fatihacet

GitLab Frontend Engineer here. I was previously working at Koding.com which is an online IDE and I was the author of Koding's collaborative IDE. Koding's ultimate goal was moving your development workflow to the cloud. To do so Koding's IDE is capable of doing most of the things which Sublime Text can do. Beyond that it has massive collaboration feature built-in. We were thinking that we did the best online IDE and we were ready to replace it with our local IDEs or text editors. We tried really hard to do so but we realised that, it's almost impossible to replace pro users local and powerful stuff with something online. Been there done that before, it didn't work.

Hopefully, GitLab's idea is not replacing your local IDE. It is just for making things easier and we are doing our best to give you the most powerful tool out there. Although, it's currently in Beta state, I believe it's very useful when I want to go and fix a typo or change a simple thing in multiple files and do a quick commit.

One last thing is, please don't forget that, not only developers use GitLab. It's kinda easy for us to checkout the target branch and do some commits but this is a golden for not so technical folks.

Plus Amazon Go eliminates the payment process. When you think how much time you lost by scanning every item and paying via cash or credit card. Amazon Go is much more easier and quicker.

I am working remotely for the last 5 years and currently working at GitLab which is a remote only company. Here are my humble advices for you.

- Always check in with your manager. Let them know your status before they ask.

- Make sure to deliver your stuff on time. If you can't do it, let your manager and other related team members before it's too late. Explain the reasons why you failed and learn your lessons. Try to avoid the same situation happen to you again. If it's your fault, accept it and move on. Try to do better next time.

- Share big and important updates with your team. It can be something simple like "Hey everybody, I did this and here you can take a look". If you use Slack you can post this to a public channel or you can send it via email.

- Add screen recordings to your Merge Requests. You can use Gif tools like, LICEcap or recordit.co.

- Be responsive to your mails, issues, TODOs, Merge Request comments etc.

- Always make sure that you have assigned with something to work on and you know what to do next.

- Try to be available when someone needs your help.

- Last one, maybe the most important one is doing a weekly meeting. If you don't have a weekly team meeting, you should tell your manager to start doing one. It's the most easiest and productive way to share important updates and sync up with other team members. At GitLab, we have a shared Google Doc and everyone can add their items to that list. Then people talk about their items then pass it to next person. You can also do daily stand-up meetings. It should be something quick and every team member should have 1-2 minute to talk about their updates and answer the questions below. You can also do this in async way by posting answers of these questions to a Slack channel.

I. What did you work on yesterday?

II. What will you work on today?

III. Is there any obstacles?

Disclosure: GitLab Frontend Engineer

I am very glad to hear that you decided to go with GitLab. We are trying hard to make it better and open for you. Thank you for your support.