Far From Me

some ideas on the art of working remote

Almost exactly twelve years ago I was working on Xbox One at Microsoft. We had a snow storm - probably just a foot, but the hilly terrain, combined with a tiny fleet of snow removal machinery meant I worked from home for most of a week. Fortunately, we had a VPN to access the desktop machines in my office, and several of us had bought/built some serial controlled devices (remember serial ports?) that enabled us to remotely reboot consoles for testing and debugging. We didn’t really teleconference back then, so I just cranked out a lot of work. Some of it was work that I’d put off (I remember one thing was a tutorial on code coverage tools for the console, and I think another was some documentation on our dynamic analysis tools). It probably wasn’t the same work I would have done if I was in the office that week, but it was valuable work.

A year or so before that, I got a sweet deal house sitting for a friend of a friend…in Toulouse, France. I was going to stay a week and then leave my …