Season 3, Issue 17: Would you like some chicken?

🐓🐔🥚

1. Checking in on Chicken

Last week on the blog I wrote about The Space Between Us, and there I talked about my interest in exploring ways we can make groups and teams feel more “solid”. I think this is important for all teams, but particularly for ones where the majority of time is spent remote from each other.

For the past few months, we’ve been exploring this via an application called Chicken, which is a playful anagram of “Check-in”. It’s not for managing projects or coordinating work; it’s for creating the kind of environment that exists in a real shared space, where you can see who is around and approximately what they’re occupying themselves with just by glancing up from your screen.

Right now we use it to communicate things like “I’m here” or “I’m out”, and beyond that, some of what we happen to be working on at the moment. 

It’s our playground for exploring new ways to interact and share as a team. We’re exploring how this sits beside and interacts with software where teams already live. I’m also exploring new interactions and more glanceable ways to be together while we’re all spread across the world.

If you think this might be interesting for your team, or if you have any other thoughts about this––or anything!––please get in touch. —JA

2. The Week That Was

This week James was updating the printer software and this happened:

Apart from our printers malfunctioning, it was a quiet and calm week. Nothing major to report. Ah, for those of you who requested the zine––just this morning I affixed the required three First-Class stamps on each envelope, and my wife just dropped them off at the mailbox, so you should receive your copy next week! —SL

3. That Feeling When You Keep Trying and Failing

You ever have that thing you’re trying to solve and it seems like it should be so easy and you keep trying this/that/the other and it keeps not working and you kind of feel like you’re going mad? That thing was happening to me on Wednesday. After doing the hard thing (with the help of James) to build a little montage image of the covers for an Album Whale album list, figuring out how to get that image to appear on the fancy card Twitter offers for shared links was seemingly impossible. I tried everything (I thought), eventually heading to Yay.Boo so I could more rapidly get public links with different options to test.

Often finding the solution to these problems is a let down. It can be a typo or, as in this case, not reading the documentation. Anyway, after a night of sleep I figured out my problem on Thursday morning, changed it up, and suddenly things worked. Yay! 

The Boo of the matter is, while I had 20 tabs open and felt that, boy, I should have learned something, the main positive to take away was simply that the thing I wanted to do was finally working. The problems I had overlooked were all written about on the Internet already. While there’s one library documentation update I can offer, mostly it’s a reminder that not all days in software land feel super successful or creative. And that’s okay! —BH

4. In Conclusion

Maybe you can clone the Mona Lisa better than I did? (We love how VOLE.wtf is keeping the internet weird.) Hope you have a calm, quiet, yet dazzling weekend!