Tag / Organization

Family First!
by Karsten Samaschke

How I work from home

To successfully work from home, I follow some simple rules allowing me to stay focused and productive.

Notifications

  1. Silence all acustical notifications
  2. Disallow all optical notifications

Work, Meetings and Time-Boxings

  1. Make a To-Do-List and work accordingly
  2. Don’t be frustrated if you don’t get all tasks done from your list – review them, schedule them for the next day, adjust
  3. Don’t do back-to-back-meetings
  4. Keep time-boxings for meetings
  5. Turn your camera on and focus on the meeting
  6. Take notes

Breaks

  1. Take regular breaks (like 5mins every hour)
  2. Allow yourself to get distracted once in a while, don’t punish yourself for it – in the end, we’re all humans, aren’t we?
  3. Get outside, when the weather allows for it, walk around, enjoy the nature

Infrastructure

  1. Invest in your infrastructure – if not already present, buy a good monitor, a good keyboard and perhaps (although currently overpriced as hell) a good webcam
  2. Invest in your meeting equipment – if not already present, buy a comfy headset, don’t use in-ears for longer meetings
  3. Invest in your interactive equipment – buy a good keyboard and a good mouse
  4. Invest in your working zone – get a good desk and a professional chair

Family-Life

Family first
  1. If your significant other is working from home as well, then use separate rooms, if possible
  2. If your kids are at home, then don’t punish them for being kids – just take the time for them, involve them, give them tasks if necessary, introduce them, wrap your day around them
  3. Take your time for your family

I try to work and live according to these rules. To me, this works out.

Hope, it does for you as well.

by Karsten Samaschke

DevOps: Just get it started!

DevOps. Just do it!

I hear this quite often:

Yeah, we want to do DevOps. We understand this is a critical thing, it is important for succeeding in our Dev- and Ops-projects. We can’t do without.

But…

…we need to get the whole picture first. We need to have a fully featured DevOps-concept. We need some infrastructure. We need top clarify with our Stakeholders.

You know what?

These are only excuses for not doing DevOps.

The best approach to DevOps is by simply starting it. Forget about that fully featured DevOps-concept to be discussed throughout all hierarchy levels of your organization. Forget about providing the perfect infrastructure. Forget about everything – just start it!

DevOps is a process and a mindset. It is an approach to collaboration, to transparency and to knowledge sharing. Yes, it always can be done better, more aligned, deeper integrated, etc.

But nonetheless: The best way to start doing DevOps is to simply start doing it.

Today.

by Karsten Samaschke

Life at Cloudibility (VII): Can’t we negotiate a special price?

I do often get this question when providing our specialist’s profiles to possible customers.

Well. No. We can’t. And we won’t.

Let me explain that bold statement a little bit. There are plenty of reasons for saying so. The most important one: We have some of the best specialists here at Cloudibility.

We love our experts.

We provide our bright minds with an environment which allows them to shine – a good work-life-balance, paid educational hours, etc. We do this, since we would have liked such an environment ourselves when being employed. But it was not possible due to calculation issues. Which forced us to quit our jobs.

Therefore, we want to pay our experts reasonable salaries and want them to gain even more knowledge. We want them to stay motivated and hunt for solutions instead of billed hours. We are investing a lot into our experts, and we are very happy and proud to do so. We know, that you deserve the best expert and the best approach for your project.

But it’s still expensive, though.

Do you know how much it costs, to do without good experts? Or to simply opt for the cheaper alternative since it is … cheaper? Can you really afford the second best or a somehow okayish solution? Just for the sake of saving some bucks forehand?

Our experts are worth their money.

They are experts and bright minds, they are able to solve problems, they are able to think outside the box. They save you time and money and nerves, they bring knowledge and experience into your projects.

So, no. We won’t do special prices.

We already have the best prices in the market since we have the best experts and the brightest minds here at Cloudibility.

Period.

by Karsten Samaschke

Life at Cloudibility (II): We need an organizational diagram

Cloudibility-Logo-SquareCloudibility is not even a year of age, but we already need an organizational diagram, since we are already close to 20 persons (17 beginning of September) working with and for us – and this is only the number of employees which have already signed their contracts, not to be spoken of the ones we are currently having conversations with!

We take this very seriously since Michael and I have experiences in enterprise environments as well as a startup history. For us, one very deciding aspect for the success of a company is the organizational structure – if you don’t have it, you are very likely to fail. And having a structure and an internal organization frees the “creatives” from having to care about everything, ultimately allowing them to focus on their work and the excellence in their doing.

One final note: The importance of a working organization and a working back-office cannot be overemphasized. That’s why I am so happy with our COO Claudia, Linda, the whole team and their invaluable work.

Thank you, team!