You're now a resident at Motel, yayyyy. This will answer some questions and kick off the best first week ever. Hopefully you're as excited as we are.
We have a standup every morning at 11:45 EST, 8:45 PST. It's quick and simple, tell everyone what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today. The goal here is to wave hi to the team, and get everyone on the same page.
You can access this meeting either via #general channel in Slack, or here.
The rest of the day, you may be pairing with another team member on a project, or working solo exploring some internal stuff. Every day is different at Motel, and that's part of why we love it so much.
If it's Thursday, you'll get to look forward to Show and Motel. This is a time (and virtual place) where we grab a drink, hang out, and show something fun we've done or learned. We want this to be as fun as informative as possible. Show off, teach something, or use this as a time to get Structured Feedback.
You're probably about to use Slack more than you thought possible. If you don't love it, we're confident you'll learn to. Being distributed, Slack is key to how we communicate as a team.
Rooms are the meat and potatoes of our Slack usage, there's probably a room for everything. Go explore.
- #general is where most group-wide messages go.
- #random is where we post funny videos, blog posts we found interesting, or other less-than-critical commentary.
- #dev is a place where everyone can talk about fancy engineering stuff. This is a great place to ask questions regarding development, whether that's big picture stuff or a little bug you can't figure out.
- #design is a place to discuss designs for feedback, or a new design article or process that could be of interest to Motel.
- #workingon uses a simple tool called (surprise) Working On. Type
/on <whatever you're working on>to update the team on... what you're working on. It's a super simple way to keep everyone on the same page and communicate passively. Feel free to jump in and comment on someone's workingon if you're excited about it!
We also have a room for each project. These will be client projects, like #healthid, as well as internal projects like #hotterkeys or #motelis (our website). We encourage you to be in as many rooms as you want. You'll end up participating in some more than others, and that's cool.
Trello is a place where we keep track of tasks and high-level asynchronous thoughts. Slack is great when you want to have a conversation, but sometimes you need something to stick in one place.
This is our master board for everything. But don't worry, it's not as scary as it sounds. Because everyone has their own process for how they work, Mark organizes his life on Trello and Scott hasn't seen a Trello board since 1999 (he loves Pivotal Tracker), we don't want the process to be too heavy. This board keeps "asks" from other team members. If someone is blocking you on a project, create a card on Trello and assign it to their board. A quick mention in Slack of the card will draw their attention to it, and now they have a little todo in Trello they can continue to reference until it's complete. If anyone needs anything from you, they'll create a card and assign it to you on Trello.
Often times, there's a dedicated board for a specific project. Go take a look at the HotterKeys board to see what we mean. These projects are organized based on their use, and may differ between client projects. << Mark >>
Hopefully, you'll never receive an email from anyone at Motel. Just kidding, but seriously, we hardly use email. Email is primarily used for notifications and invites from software services, and communication with the outside world.
Dropbox is where we store all of our static documents, literally, it's where everything is. Mark organized the Dropbox, so you can be sure that it's in top shape. Basically, there's Project Folders, as well as Global Motel Stuff. In project folders are the resources and assets for everything you may need for a specific project. In Motel, we also have resources that we'll use across the company.
Github is where all of Motel's code lives. See our Git Guidelines for a more in depth look at how we use Git and Github throughout projects at Motel.
We use both Hackpack and Google Docs to create documents, both for client purposes and internal stuff. The line is a little grey here, some people prefer using Hackpad, some Google Docs.Pick one of the two when you need it, we won't hate.
Google Docs certainly has more formats, so if you ever need to make a spreadsheet, that'd be the place to be. Google Docs also has create collaboration features: the ability to mark an edit as complete, suggest an edit, commenting is robust.
Hackpad has a great, simple interface that lets you get your content out quick.
Our daily meeting is held on Zoom. After our meeting, we usually stay on Zoom (via video), and mute our microphones so we can spy on each other and hang out in the same room. Show and Motel is usually held on Zoom as well.
Appear.in is great for quick meetings, great for making a quick room and jumping in with a couple people. It's also great for clients, because it needs no authentication or anything like that. If you just want to video chat with one other person, Appear.in is the way to go.