###### At Clevertech we build people first, then technology

Since 2000, we’ve been helping the world's most innovative organizations build incredible, game changing technologies. We hire world-class people and give them the freedom to produce their best work, again and again.

Our team is made up of parents, travelers, motivated professionals, and people looking to grow in their careers. We communicate primarily via Slack and video calls, and have created a tight knit community where you feel like you have the worlds greatest co-workers at your fingertips.

Meet Chad Furman, Chad is one of the Tech Leads at Clevertech. Chad loves working remotely because it’s allowed him to continue to grow in his career without having to go into a traditional office every day. Chad’s going to take us through 6 lessons he’s learned along the way to help him find success.


###### 1. The key to success is communication

While managing a remote team, the most valuable lesson that I’ve learned is that my project’s success relies on one thing above all else: honest, consistent, and frequent communication. These three principles help to: build trust, maintain relationships, set expectations, clear blockers, and organize priorities. 

**How can you tell if you are on the right path?** Listen to the mood of the team. See if your team is enthusiastic and if they’re contributing independently. If they’re not, it’s a great time to help them find solutions to their problems and work with them to find success

###### 2. Building trust within your remote team

As a Tech Lead, the success of our project depends on your knowledge of the technology, and your ability to manage people. To lead a project, you must earn the respect of your team and clients. You must also respect yourself (don’t take it all on your own shoulders). When you respect yourself and are confident in your ability, it’s easier to inspire others to respect and have confidence in you as well. Believe in yourself, because you can do this. Maintain a positive attitude and lift the team with you.

**How to build respect with your team:**

- Get buy-in from your team and client on any important decisions

- Learn how to set and deliver on expectations

- Be a problem solver, and know when to ask for help

- Consistently be trustworthy and dependable

- Lead meetings, manage expectations, resolve conflicts and otherwise carry out your role trusting yourself and the other people on the project. Build and protect that trust.


###### 3. Sharing ownership with your team

The product you’re building is as much for you as it is for the client – you want it to ultimately succeed as much as the client does. Together you can build something beautiful and innovative.

When you truly own a product, you care about it. You understand what the business needs, and you have a stake in those needs being met. Whether it’s making a site look great, creating a positive user experience, or completing a product and generating sales. This is your creation, and you want it to be successful! You’ll also make better technical decisions while more easily maintaining the client’s trust. All because you know both the business, and technical priorities.

It’s easy to forget, but always make sure to share the ownership. Make sure your team feels comfortable voicing their ideas and concerns. It’s important that their ideas are heard and acted on, and to always thank them for their contributions

###### 4. Don’t forget...your personality


With only remote communication to rely on, you need to bring your personality to each project. Clients will enjoy discussions with you more, and you’ll be able to build trust and create stronger relationships. Communication is an important building block for managing remote projects.

Being a personable leader also helps with your team. If your team is able to talk to you, they’ll feel more comfortable asking questions, making suggestions, and coming to you with the hard stuff. When people are comfortable in a conversation, they usually provide you more honest feedback which is essential to growth and success.

Ideas: Everyone wear hats on release day, use Zoom or Google Hangout’s draw tools to color-in the lead, or tons of other fun ideas to bond the team in a fun way.

###### 5. Meeting IRL
 
Having a remote team doesn’t mean that you never get together in real life. An occasional meeting, especially when it makes sense for the project like at an important milestone or presentation, gives you the ability to eat a meal together and toast each other with an actual glass! Take the opportunity to meet in person if that’s a possibility and it makes sense for the stage of the project.

###### 6. Curating your dream team

Every team member must be geared for success, and there are some traits that are helpful when assessing teammates.

Here are some things our hiring team looks for when hiring for the Clevertech team:

- Critical Thinking: Can this person independently find the answer to a hard problem?

- Curious: Does this person get excited by new challenges?

- Cooperative: Will they build up others or tear them down?

- Coachable: How well does this person take assignment, direction, and feedback?

- Detail-oriented: Does this person create solutions which ignore edge-cases? 

- Reliable: Is this person online, in stand-up, sending updates, and contributing?

- Collaborative: When this person is stuck, do they pair or ask for help?

We hope these six steps help you and your remote team succeed. Tweet us and let us know how you’ve used these steps with your team. If you’re interested in joining a fully remote team check out our open jobs on: [https://www.clevertech.careers/](https://www.clevertech.careers/)
 

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Beyond Remote: Six Steps to Successful Remote Teams

###### Stress and more bugs

After thirty minutes of being drilled by his boss, Dan, who served as the CTO, wanted to throw his computer across the room. His team had not been able to push all of the new features that he promised they would push before this meeting, and the ones they did push had bugs! 

Dan sat there seething. He couldn't help but wonder where he went wrong. His team had worked hard, long hours. They pushed many lines of code and closed heaps of tickets. How had the result turned out so grossly short of their ambitions and promises?

As he reflected further, he remembered his team ignoring the overload of monitoring alerts which caused them to miss the crucial ones. Their builds were taking what felt like forever so they couldn’t waste time updating minor bugs. They just kept moving forward, piling complication on top of complication in hopes of reaching the deadline. 

So where did Dan go wrong? What could he have paid attention to that would have saved him the frustration and embarrassment of that morning's meeting?

Ideally, he would be able to look at one keystone measurement that would have been indicative of the overall health of their software development. 

###### So, for a custom development company, what is the keystone measurement for health?


At Clevertech, this is build time. Since constantly delivering builds is at the foundation of what we do, our build time becomes a keystone indicator for the health of our code and production environment. Measuring how quickly we can get each build up into the system ensures that we identify bottlenecks in our production system. 



**We measure build time for three primary reasons: **

- Speed: One of our core values allowing us to operate at maximum efficiency. 
- Performance: If the build time is taking more than a handful of minutes it may reveal that we are using an old library and, instead of building on top of it, we need to update it so that we can drive build time down and performance up.  
- Developer Delight: If a build is taking 30 minutes and a developer has to push it three times in a day, they have now wasted an hour and a half of their time for a process that could have taken less than 10 minutes.  

To achieve this at Clevertech, we have a full continuous integration suite where software is constantly being compiled in a containerized fashion with a variety of tests that are run against it. After the tests pass, it is deployed in a way that allows for zero downtime in the system. This even allows for things like feature flags so that you can deploy to only 10% of the traffic before deciding to deploy to the full load.

Build time uncovers insights about where there is bloat in the production system. Ultimately, it allows us to use one keystone measurement that pinpoints speed, performance, health, and optimizes for developer delight with just one simple question.

If you’d like to find out more about our culture at Clevertech and current job openings, check out our [YouTube channel ](https://www.youtube.com/c/clevertechlife) and visit [clevertech.careers](http://clevertech.careers).

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One example of a keystone measurement is the temperature of the body. When you feel ill, one of the first things you do is take your temperature because it is indicative of health. When your temperature is high, it flags that something is wrong and needs to be further inspected and fixed.

One simple tool to diagnose the health of long term software development

###### Build time is the amount of time it takes for the code to compile. Why does that matter?

If build time is quick, it means that a coder can (and will) test their code at shorter intervals, tweaking the code and making each feature more perfectly crafted. 

Paying attention to build time pre-empts future problems. For example, in one of our long-term projects, we made the move to React for the front end, but left some of the code in Jade. The Jade code was working well, but it was slowing down the build time by as much as five minutes because of the server-side calls in the code. By refactoring, we didn’t just improve the build time. We also are future-proofing the code base from dependencies in other areas. Refactoring also reduces code debt and makes it easier to add future features. As with anything else, having the right tools for the job means that we can pinpoint the areas for upgrading. 

The diagram below shows our project dashboard for the build time of an application. The blue shading shows which area of the code is taking the most time to compile during the build. At Clevertech, we pay attention to the build time of all of our projects and we have the tools that allow us to peer into each step of the process so we can ensure cutting edge standards. This chart is pulled out of a recent review, with all the project names changed for sharing on this blog.




At Clevertech, we pay attention to the build time of all of our projects and we have the tools that allow us to peer into each step of the process so we can ensure cutting edge standards. This chart is pulled out of a recent review, with all the project names changed for sharing on this blog.

You can see that not only do we break down the average build time for each project, we also use a Kibana chart that breaks down the average by github branch. We can see how fast the master branch vs the development branch. For example, Project 3 have a big difference between dev and prod. But in this case, it looks like the dark coded project 1 is the slowest, so lets take a look at that in more depth.

Digging in more deeply, here is the view using BlueOcean plugin, so we can see each step in the build. We can see the breakdown of the steps where one step was taking 7 minutes - more than double the time of any other part of that build cycle. 

If we could focus just on that one process, we could halve the build time in this section. 





As shown below, we brought the process time down from 7 minutes to less than 1 minute by using a cache for this step and cleaning up just two of the processes during the Build and Push Images process.

###### Making these kinds of improvements is a matter of pride and craftsmanship for us at Clevertech. 

It’s not just about providing the highest quality software development; it’s also about enjoying our work. Developers are happy when they don’t waste time waiting for code to compile. We can all focus on performing our best when the environment is conducive to efficient work.  

[Reach out](https://www.clevertech.careers/) to find out more about why the top global corporations prefer Clevertech as their outsourced development team.

If you’d like to find out more about our culture at Clevertech and current job openings, check out our [YouTube channel ](https://www.youtube.com/c/clevertechlife) and visit [clevertech.careers](http://clevertech.careers).



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Coding is a complex craft, and many of the most profound updates are invisible to the end user, but crucial to the developers. A better experience for the developers leads to a better codebase in general. For that reason, in every project we develop, we keep an eye on the build time. 

At Clevertech, we're committedto learning and growing every day, together.

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