Experts From The One Minute Commute

I telecommuted for seven years before I started work on The One Minute Commute. I gained a good understanding of remote work in that time, but I wanted to know more and make this book as good as possible. I interviewed over 60 experts and learned how some of the best high-tech companies organize and enable effective distributed teams. This is a partial list of the many experts who helped make The One Minute Commute possible and links where you can find out more about them.

Chris helped me answer a fundamental question: “how will potential employers find me?” His contributions to The One Minute Commute are mostly in the chapter about selling yourself as a product. Chris is a social media expert, public speaker, and president of New Marketing Labs. A lot of the way this blog looks and works is thanks to the insightful articles on Chris’s site.

Chris’s is the author of Trust Agents and a contributor to Workshifting.com.

I talked with Ben about the formation of the Subversion team and how they communicate with their larger community. Ben is a founding member of the Subversion project and a senior open source manager at Google. He blogs occasionally about Subversion, technology, and anything else he is interested in.

Jono is a member of the team at Mozilla Labs and a user interface expert. He gave me an in-depth look at the Ubiquity team and how they work. Jono blogs about user interface issues and the work he is doing with Mozilla at Not the User’s Fault.

Nancy gave me some of the best advice in the world about remote presentations. She is the CEO of Duarte Design and the author of one of my favorite books about presentations Slide:ology: The Art And Science Of Creating Great Presentations. Nancy blogs about presentation design and other design issues at the Slide:ology blog. If you want to make your presentations better this is a great place to start.

My interview with Paul was one of the most interesting and unexpected of all the interviews I did for The One Minute Commute. His interview, books, and academic papers shaped much of my thinking about communicating with your team and staying close when you are far away. He doesn’t blog, but his books are so great I had to mention them here. Dr. Ekman is a technical consultant to and the inspiration for the hit television show Lie To Me. His latest book Emotional Awareness was co-written with the Dalai Lama

Brian is a senior manager and open source advisor at Google and a founding member of the Subversion project. He is an advocate for consensus-based teams and he influenced many of the ideas about open teams in The One Minute Commute. Brian blogs at Confessions of a Digital Packrat.

Karl’s influence on The One Minute Commute was enormous and he shows up more than any other interviewee in the book. He is the author of Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, another founding member of the Subversion team, and blogs at rants.org.

Jason is a managing partner of 37signals, a public speaker, a frequent contributor to the influential blog Signal vs. Noise, and the co-author of Getting Real and Rework.

Scott is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, public speaker, and runs the popular blog Computer Zen. He manages a team of people working remotely around the United States and blogs often about working remotely.

David is the other managing partner of 37signals, a public speaker, a frequent contributor to the influential blog Signal vs. Noise, and the co-author of Getting Real and Rework. David is also the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework.

Mark is the co-founder of Manager Tools and the creator of the Manager Tools podcast and blog. His firm focuses on developing the management and supervisory skills of front line managers. Mark regularly speaks at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University and he has been requested to testify before the United States Congress on management issues. Mark helped me figure out the best way to get the job you want and sell yourself as a remote engineer.

Ade is the Development Manager for Microsoft’s patterns & practices group and helped me with some of the issues of working remotely in an Agile team. He writes papers under the Microsoft name and at http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech.

Jason Orendorff works on the JavaScript engine of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. He blogs about Mozilla hacking and the FireFox SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

Mike is a core Subversion developer, co-author of Version Control With Subversion, and the primary maintainer of ViewVC. He blogs at http://cmpilato.blogspot.com.

Aza is the Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs. He blogs about Mozilla and user interface issues at http://www.azarask.in.

John is the JavaScript evangelist for Mozilla and the creator of the JQuery JavaScript library. He is also the author of Pro JavaScript Techniques and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. His blog is the example of a great professional programmer blog in The One Minute Commute.

Garr’s advice on the remote presentation chapter was invaluable. He is an expert on presentations and blogs about them at Presentation Zen. He is also the author of my other favorite book on presentations, Presentation Zen. His website is a textbook example of effective personal branding.

Ben has worked for Mozilla since 2005. He is the lead developer of the XULRunner project and the module owner of Mozilla’s toolkit, embedding, and build system modules. In other words, if you like Firefox Ben is one of the people you should thank.

Atul is a member of the team at Mozilla Labs and a leader on the Ubiquity project. He blogs about user interface issues at Toolness.

Bear in mind that the research paper writing should be done within a span of just a couple affordable-papers.net of minutes.