Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’m into my third week of working from home and I’m starting to feel it. My back is playing up, my neck and shoulders are tight, and my legs are getting increasingly more restless. My make-shift remote work setup consists of a little desk and a dining table chair. Not exactly the ergonomic home office setup the health and safety department would recommend. Everyone is working under different circumstances, but we all want to be as productive as we can. Some of you may still be in an office.

Remote pair programming is an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology which is a part of the Agile software development model. It takes the principle of pair programming to the remote workplace. Pair programming leads to higher quality code and fewer bugs by making continuous code reviews and synchronous collaboration possible. In traditional pair programming, two programmers sit side by side in front of the same computer.

When the harmful effects of the coronavirus pandemic began to accelerate globally, Axosoft wanted to step in and do what we could to help as an organization. While we have always offered GitKraken Pro license free for students, teachers, and nonprofits, we wanted to extend our offerings in these especially trying times. We recently announced the GitKraken Pro for a Cure Program, offering free GitKraken Pro licenses for teams of up to 25 developers working on a COVID-19 related project.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to require employees to work from home. It’s a new normal for many, but at Grafana Labs our team has always recruited and operated with a remote-first culture in mind. To help everyone transition to a home office environment, we launched a new WFH series in which Grafana team members have been sharing their best advice for staying productive at home – yes, even if you have kids around.

As a remote-first company, we bring employees and members of our community together once a year at our offsite event, which is called MatterCon. MatterCon isn’t your run-of-the-mill conference—it’s more of a meeting of the minds where we’re encouraged to get to know the people we work with, share ideas with each other, and create together.

If your organization is like virtually every other in the world (including ours!), you use a mix of Microsoft products in your productivity stack, possibly including SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive. But you probably also rely on a variety of other applications, maybe even mingling in “competing” tools like G Suite or Dropbox, in addition to complementary tools like Zendesk or GitHub.

In times when a majority of employees are working from home due to the global coronavirus pandemic, enterprises are extensively relying on collaboration tools like Zoom to keep their employees productive and engaged. Only in March, the daily usage of Zoom Videos increased over 5 times. The platform made it easy for company employees and clients to hop on meetings whenever needed and for schools and students to continue education online.

On the 16th of every month, we release an update to the Mattermost server. The release happens on the same day, every month, without fail. It’s a cadence that our customers have come to rely on, and it helps us deliver new features and updates with drumbeat regularity. Hitting this hard deadline every month while ensuring high-quality releases requires clear processes and organizational discipline. This is a challenge for any team.

For many of us, “working” is incredibly difficult right now. That’s true at the organizational level, where maintaining business continuity and accounting for changes in customer needs are even more critical. But it’s also true at the individual level, where the sudden shift to working from home has jolted us all into working in new ways, and made virtual collaboration an essential part of each workday.