Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky
Runner. Coffee nerd. Software engineer.

I’ve been working remote since September 2016. There are a lot of engineers who have worked remote longer than I have; there are others who have more insight into how they work than I do; and there are plenty of people who simply don’t work in the same way I do. My intention in this post is to share how I work, the reasons why I work that way, and what I think others should try while finding the process that works best for them and their teams.

Just over a year ago, I left the startup I was working for and started my own business. My intention was to do freelance work (“consulting”, to all my clients) until I was able to launch my first product, and then shift into being a product company. My ambitions and confidence were very high. In this last year, I have accomplished a great deal and have a lot of pride in the work I did, as well as what I have learned. Nothing took the path I expected it to, but I wouldn’t change that at all. With that in mind, sadly, I am winding down my consulting work and taking on a new full-time job. I’ll explain why at the end, but first I want to share some a little bit about what I have experienced in the last year and why it was valuable.

Here’s an exchange that’s pretty common:

This was my first time going to PyOhio, and it was a blast. There will be some videos being posted soon, so I will opt to link to those as they come in, but first, here are some of the highlights:

One of the keys in baking bread is getting the dough to rise well. As the yeast does its work, it ferments some of the sugars in the dough into alcohol and carbon dioxide, resulting in a growing, bubbly mass of dough.

Update: I wrote this while preparing a talk for the Columbus Functional Programmers meetup. You can find the talk on YouTube. It has more humor than these words, but then you’d have to listen to my voice.

A friend of mine is very into keyboards and, after seeing his keyboards at work and admiring his Ergodox many times, I took the plunge and built my own. 152 solder joints later, I have this beauty:

It has long been predicted that with more automation and more technology, we could all work less and have more leisure time, but we continue to fall short of that promise. In many ways, we’re working harder and longer, with more stress, than previous generations did. I think that a large part of that is because of societal pressures to work long hours, even when doing so doesn’t make sense.

At the end of this week, I am starting a new chapter of my life: entrepreneurship. This is my last week at CrossChx, and then I begin splitting my time between contract work and developing some of my own ideas.

On March 22, 2016, I talked about scaling up graphs at Scale Tech. It was recorded and is viewable on YouTube: