What are you working on?
Interview with Shivani, a remote content writer who shares lessons learned
I have two businesses — I work as a freelance content strategist/marketer and writer and also as part of a content studio called The City Studio that focuses on place marketing.
My roles are quite different in both. In my freelance role, I work with clients directly to understand their business, create a strategy, and write the content. I often collaborate with design agencies on projects, and together we offer a complete service to the client that includes branding, strategy, content, design, and development/print.
At The City Studio, I’m part of a small, amazing team, and I tend to take up more of an editor or project manager role. I also handle our admin and compliances — my legal background definitely comes in handy!
Shivani provides all you need to know about making remote work...work. She shares tips on finding the best remote work opportunity and thriving once you get it.
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Interview with Michael, a VFX artist that works remotely
I’m currently working on a Wild West short cg in real-time using Unreal utilizing everything I’ve learned with a story to it. Have the basic assets and some of the models revisiting things that I want to look better.
A link to the reel in progress can be found on ArtStation.
I am also working on a small Kickstarter for a Halloween project still setting everything up, and some Upwork projects when I get a client.
Michael is a freelance visual effects (VFX) artist, creating 3d models, mockups and videos while working remotely.
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Interview with Eddie, an Engineering Director
At the Director level, I serve at the intersection of people, process and technology.
My job is building happy, productive, inclusive teams and helping them do their best work, so that our customers (both internal and external) can also do their best work.
I run half of our software engineering group at Litmus. Specifically, our team is responsible for all the customer-facing web properties, including full-stack web apps and APIs, most of them built with Ruby on Rails.
Our team is about 15 folks total. I manage both engineers and engineering managers across a range of skill levels and tenure.
My day mostly revolves around making sure everyone's needs are met. This involves regular 1:1s and coaching with my direct reports, code reviews with scrum teams, planning with stakeholders from Product, Marketing, Sales & Finance, interviewing candidates if we have open engineering roles, and contributing to our code base where it can improve developer experience & overall quality of life.
Eddie is an Engineering Director - learn how he manages to absorb interruptions and manage information overload while staying productive.
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Interview with Nelvina, a fashion designer who designs bags and clothing
I currently work on several bag design projects including travel backpacks, a diaper bag, storage bags, an outdoor backpack, shoulder bag, a garment bag. I am also working on a logo design and also board short designs for a surf brand.
Nelvina is a freelance fashion and graphic designer that works remotely while working with clients all around the world
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Interview with Ben, a CEO/Engineer who works remotely
I'm working on IPinfo.io - we're known for our free IP geolocation API, which handles around 500 million API requests a day for around 100,000 business and developers.
We also do a lot of work around different IP address data sets, such as company and carrier details for an IP, domains hosted on an IP address, and IP type classification, where we'll let you know if an IP address corresponds to a business, a hosting provider, or a consumer ISP.
Ben is a CEO/Engineer who works remotely - find out how he balances working at home and family life!
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Interview with Kevin, a developer and remote consultant
I'm currently working on a short ebook about getting started with Machine Learning in Javascript. I'm really fascinated by the technology, and there's a surprising amount we can do in the browser today.
I started my own meetup here in Boston called AI & Design, and we've grown to more than 300 people. I also recently gave a talk on using Tensorflow.js, and hope to give more talks this fall.
I'm consulting for about 20 hours per week, and will be auditing Startup School (put out by Y Combinator.
I'm also working on a (personal) album of music that I'm hoping to release this fall!
Kevin is a developer and consultant working on many different projects - learn which tools he uses to optimize his time management.
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Interview with Ayesha, a freelance writer that gained early clients through her blog
I am currently working with four active clients. The first is a Keto Nutritionist. I won’t name her because I’m not certain she would be comfortable with that. I create blog posts for her and optimize them for SEO.
The second one is a fairly new Vastu Consultant business. I’m managing her social media pages.
The third is Candy Co, a business that sells loyalty program to small businesses. I write blog posts for them also.
The fourth is a very busy entrepreneur, Jerica Rossi. I am helping her compile an email list. That’s more admin-based work, but I usually don’t say no to nice clients like her.
I do have a few other clients who aren’t active right now. I usually have to wake them up by emailing them. We do a couple of things and they go back to hibernation. But that’s cool with me. I know they are there and on slow months, I can get some extra work.
Ayesha is a freelance content writer—learn how she made the leap to remote work while building her blog and raising her family
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Interview with Igor Kulman, a software engineer building iOS apps remotely
I am currently the lead iOS developer for a German company developing a secure messaging app for corporate customers.
I basically got hired to ditch the old hybrid app and write it from scratch and better natively with a colleague and I think we did a really good job.
I am still in touch with one client from the old days of Windows development, they contact me every few months to make some small change in the app.
Igor converted a part-time contract into a full-time remote software engineering job—learn how he did it and his tips for working remotely.
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Interview with Max, a Deep Learning Engineer with a winning strategy for distractions
I'm working as a Deep Learning Engineer, which in my case means building and maintaining open source machine learning software. Most of what I do daily is publicly available on GitHub, which makes it easy for me to share my work.
Also, this way, I get a complete history of how I work and what I worked on automatically, which is worth more than any reference or bullet point on a CV.
Open source programs are an excellent place for remote culture since feedback from users comes in around the clock, and communication is mostly asynchronous. So it's all about getting the job done and not about when you sit at your desk. Also, having a globally distributed team certainly helps with coverage of various time-zones.
The world of artificial intelligence (AI) speaks Python, but many production systems do not. In my work at Skymind, I'm focused on closing this gap by providing tools that work well for both worlds.
The companies' view in that regard resonates with me on a personal level, since I've struggled a lot myself in the early stages of my career in shipping machine learning models to production.
Skymind has a remote-first culture, which in my experience is vastly superior to working remotely for a company which has a headquarters. In the latter case, you always feel left out, but in a remote-first setting, everyone is in the same boat.
Recently I've been working on bringing Google TensorFlow and Keras models to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), accessing Java classes from Python, training deep learning algorithms on Apache Spark and making it easier to run and deploy your models with Python and Java.
The little time I've got left when not coding I spend giving talks and writing books. My new book teaches readers the method to build a bot that can play the game of Go. As the chapters progress, the bot becomes stronger and stronger.
I think it's very interesting that there are no machine learning prerequisites, but at the end of it, you understand how AlphaGo beat the best human players in the world.
It was a lot of fun writing this book, as it's very interactive, and I had a great co-author. Working in a remote setup certainly helped me to complete it. For instance, scheduling calls with editors in different time-zones are so much easier if you can shift your work hours to accommodate the meeting.
After a chance Twitter conversation, Max found a remote position as a Deep Learning Engineer —see how he manages distractions and maintains focus throughout his day.
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Interview with Bennah, a remote ESL teacher that teaches kids English all over the world
As of the moment before the days of my resignation, I currently am working on establishing my work station at home because I still work in the college from morning of 8 am to 5 pm, and would immediately go home to get myself ready to be online at 5:30 on wards.
Tired from my morning work, I still manage to face my students online with a smile and a very jolly tone of voice saying good evening, or asking if they have eaten their dinner, while I, myself can't eat my dinner yet.
Bennah is an ESL (English as a Second Language) Teacher who teaches students from all around the world while working from home.
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