#productivity
Posts tagged #productivity on Dynamo Geeks: 17 posts from the community, most useful first.
Posts tagged #productivity
Async across 4 timezones: what we changed after a 9-hour gap broke our sprint
My product team is spread across Manila, Bengaluru, Lisbon and Toronto. On paper it's "follow the sun". In practice, in August, it was "follow the confusion". What broke Our Toronto engineer asked a question about an API change at 5pm her time. That's 5am in Manila, 2:30am in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru dev had the answer, but by the time he woke up the question was buried under 40 messages in a busy channel. The…
lofi girl has done more overtime with me than any coworker ~ this "1 A.M Study Session" mix is my pixel art soundtrack, chiptune when I'm animating cats. what do you code to? drop it below 🐈🎧
I logged every AI-assisted coding task for a month. Here is the honest ledger
I keep asking people to measure, so it is only fair that I did it myself. For September I logged every coding task at work where I used an AI assistant: what it was, how long it took, how long I estimate it would have taken without, and whether I had to fix the output. The estimates are mine and biased; I tried to be conservative in both directions. The ledger tasks logged: 47 clearly faster: 29 (est. 11.5 h saved)…
Which AI coding tool do y'all actually pay for with your own money?
Our roadmap has no dates after six weeks. Sales survived. Here is how
Six months ago our roadmap was a Gantt chart with quarter-end dates on everything for the next 12 months. Every date after week six was fiction, everyone knew it, and we kept updating the fiction anyway. Some notes on what we replaced it with, at a 40-person health tech startup. The format Now (next 6 weeks): committed, with dates. The team has estimated it and it is in a sprint plan. Next (roughly 6 weeks to 3…
our startup tried a 4 day week for 3 months. here are the numbers, not the vibes
we're a 9 person logistics startup in sapporo (6 engineers). in may our ceo agreed to a 3 month trial of a 4 day week: same pay, fridays off, 32 hours. everyone on mastodon has opinions about this, so i challenged to collect actual numbers. here they are. small team, one trial, not a study. but numbers. the setup mon-thu, 9:00 to 18:00 with an hour lunch. fridays off for everyone, not rotating one person on call on…
The school concert was at 3 pm on a Tuesday. Here is the calendar block I now use, and why I stopped apologising for it
My daughter is seven. Last month her school had its annual day concert at 3 pm on a Tuesday, which, if you are a working parent in India, you will recognise as a time chosen by someone who has never had a 3 pm sprint review. For years, my move in this situation was to sneak out. Leave my status green, keep Slack open on my phone in the auditorium, answer one message during the song my daughter had practised for…
i logged every work hour for 4 weeks to answer dana's question. did AI 10x my output? (no. but.)
back in june i posted that AI tools 10x'd my output. dana (@dana_ml) asked what 10x meant. i said it FEELS like 10x. she said feelings are data with a very wide confidence interval. she was right and it annoyed me for two months. so. the setup 4 weeks, mid july to early august. 19 work days (i took one day off after the july mess) odd days: AI allowed (claude code, cursor, chat). even days: no AI except plain editor…
Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle (2012). Watch at least the platformer part: he changes the code and the game changes while it runs, and he scrubs time back. This is why I care so much about iteration time, and why live reload in Godot matters more to me than any feature list !
Our PMs started drafting PRDs with AI. Six weeks later, this is what I would keep
In June our product team (four PMs including me) agreed to draft PRDs with an AI assistant for six weeks. Health tech, so no patient data went anywhere near it; we used it for structure and wording, with our own call notes as input. Some honest notes, since this topic asks for what was actually tried. What got better Blank page time went to almost zero. Getting from "notes from three customer calls" to a first draft…
Right, they're down. Where was I? Coding in the 9pm to midnight window as a dad of two
Every evening at about half eight I do the same thing. Bath, teeth, two stories (one of which is always the same dinosaur book, I could recite it in my sleep and sometimes do), one glass of water, one second glass of water, "Dad there's a noise", and then finally, around nine, quiet. I come downstairs, open the laptop and say out loud to nobody, "right, they're down, where was I." The answer, for about the first…
Le daily de 15 minutes qui dure 47 minutes : une enquête
Bon. Je viens d'arriver ici et je commence direct par râler, c'est culturel, désolé pas désolé. Chez nous le daily est censé durer 15 minutes. J'ai chronométré pendant trois semaines (oui, je suis comme ça). Moyenne : 47 minutes. Record : 1h12, un mardi, parce que quelqu'un a dit "rapidement, juste un point sur la mise en prod". Le déroulé typique : 9h30 : "on attend Julien" (pas le mien, un autre Julien, il y a…
when standup ends 2 minutes early
unpopular with some of you but: AI tools 10x'd my output…
unpopular with some of you but: AI tools 10x'd my output this year. one person, 3 products, shipping like a team of 4. not hype, just my life now
A normal workday in Kyiv during blackouts, hour by hour (with my power setup)
Few people asked after my air raid deploy post how a normal day looks. So here is one. Not the worst day, not the best. Tuesday. I work remote for a Danish company, Go and Postgres, team of 6. Kyiv is one hour ahead of Copenhagen, which is the only easy part. 06:40 Wake up, before coffee I check the outage schedule in the energy company app and in our district Telegram channel. Kyiv is split in groups, my building…
Working with US clients from Manila: the 2-hour overlap rule
I have worked with US teams from Manila for three years. The first year I said "I'm flexible, I'll be available whenever" and nearly burned out by month eight. Here's what I do now. The time maths Manila is UTC+8 all year. No daylight saving. US East in summer is UTC-4, so 12 hours apart. 9am in New York is 9pm in Manila. US West in summer is UTC-7, so 15 hours apart. 9am in San Francisco is midnight in Manila. When…