There will opportunities come before you to collaborate on a project, sometimes the collaboration is on a local level with a possible mutual understanding and backgrounds, where there is no awkardness to began induldging into project development directly. And sometimes the atmosphere and team for the project to collaborate is of different backgrounds, where there is discomfort to start the conversation and difficulty to begun with collaboration on project development. For that, I am writing the key points that helped me and given a refreshing experience while collaborating on a project working remotely.
Focus on your Tech stack strengths
Do not forget that this collaboration is initiated for the building of a project. Put focus on your tech stack strengths and take responsibilities to build certain parts and functionalities of the project. Do not wait for someone to direct you in some direction and follow along the development journey of the project. If your stack strengths are already taken by someone else, do not hesitate to learn a new stack either. And continuously give your feedback and contributions that you wanted to take responsibility of.
Live coding and debugging
Connect on a zoom call and live share your code, do talk about what you are coding or debugging in that call. It maintains flow of information fluent. Do not engage in other task while you are live sharing session is still on, it reflects your busyness. Ask them to schedule sessions in your free time. Dedicated multiple coders in meeting counts to numerous eyes and as they say, "second eye is always a good debugger" . So it will boost productivty and boost your project development.
Ask Questions
Do ask away any question that bugs your understanding of the code. It is the reason to collaborate with high skilled teammates, that you learn to ask good questions and grow your skills. Honing your skills comes from great question and great question arises from in-depth code-reviewing. Do read other player's code as it will help you to understand the overall flow of your project from scratch. And knowing the actual reason of something that happens in code is the real learning you should seek in a collaboration.
Learn how to use github effectively as a Contributor!
Learning how to use github for collaboration on a project while working remotely is very crucial because it is the platform that provides you the traction from the friction of localhood. Learning how to contribute on github repo without disturbing the main branch of project is an important skill to learn. And only way to learn is by doing. Do as much as possible of github contribution to inculcate the habit of creating pull request for contribution to main branch.
Communication is the key
Interact clearly as much as possible with your teammates. Declare your intentions and ideas openly without any hesitation. Do not preconceive any judgement or comment from your respective teammates. Talk to them with respect and apologise on events when communication is flawed or intent is misinterpreted or your actions caused some error in the Software/Application development life cycle. It will all happen, but you neeed to learn to explain your intent and apologise for the mistake and learn from it.
#collaboration #communication #mintbean #remote #remotework
