David Alison's Blog

I've long been an advocate of people in a technology-oriented job being able to work from home, even if it's just a day or two a week. I've even provided some tips on working from home on this blog. In the early days of my software engineering career, working from home had some significant obstacles that really don't exist today. I tried to work from home once I had a serious commute. Back then I lived in Los Angeles and had to spend an average of 50 minutes commuting to work and back every day. Over 400 hours a year spent staring at tail-lights and bumper stickers in LA traffic. It was just awesome. My bosses at the time didn't like the idea of me working from home because they didn't think I could be productive from there. Relative to today's technology, I can see why. A Different Time Back then (1988—1994) my ability to work remotely was severely limited. I used a modem to dial into my office computer using PCAnywhere and hoped that my wife didn...

The core product for my company, SharedStatus , has undergone a pretty large overhaul that I would like to share with you. First off, what does SharedStatus do? SharedStatus is a free online service that helps you keep get stuff done as a team. You can create a project, add team members to it and assign tasks to yourself and others. You can also share ideas through messages and comments. Most project management tools focus on features only a project manager needs, and often have lots of overkill; SharedStatus is focused on the people that actually get the work done, making it easy for everyone to update their status as they go. You can eliminate the last minute status report updates and time wasting status meetings; it’s why we call it SharedStatus. What’s New and Improved Here is a quick summary: New UI - It’s clean, simple and focuses on the content. We made it highly responsive, so much so that it often feels like a local desktop application. Labels - We added a project wide labe...