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Author: Adrian Oprea

Adrian is the person behind WeRemote.EU. He's been a software developer since 2008 and has been enjoying his work tremendously.

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/ Opinion

Stop Stepping In

The full weight of your position within the company is behind anything you say. We're often tempted to give our two cents, but we might end up causing more harm than good. And we're also preventing people from getting the experience they need.
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/ Updates

WeRemote has updates

2020 was a tumultuous year for all of us. For me as a maker and a founder it also meant trouble. Some contracts fell through the cracks, the curfew, a loss of connection with some people and an overall degraded state of mind led to me not focusing on the platform. 
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/ Opinion / Remote Work

Remote work demographics on WeRemote

In an attempt to understand who’s accessing our platform I was recently looking through our analytics data. Given the times were living, and the amount of mistakes I’ve made while developing and promoting this platform, I thought applying some new learnings and insights I got can start with looking at our existing data. Many companies focus extensively on user acquisition and forget to cater towards the users they already have. This is something I really want to change.
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/ Opinion / Remote Work

Employee surveillance - a dangerous trend in remote work

There's a saying that even the smallest drop of sewage can spoil a glass of the finest champagne, no matter how big the glass is or how much champagne you pour in it. For the past three years I've been trying to popularize remote work as an alternative to office-based work. I said alternative, yes. It is important to make this distinction since in our complexly organized world, there's rarely a case where one option could completely replace another. Unfortunately, in our polarized society with its tendency to be distributed at the extremes of any topic and thin at the middle, it is hard to get such a concept across. For people who only see in black or white it's hard to make them see the grays. While advocating on my merry way, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and it pushed many companies to forcefully adopt and adapt to remote work.
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/ Updates

WeRemote gets a dedicated uptime status page

Being able to monitor things in production is a very useful thing. Getting alerts when something goes down, maybe getting some information about the reason why the service is considered to be "down". But more important than you, yourself getting alerts, it's important to be able to tell users when there are problems, and when they are fixed. Since we decided to go full-speed ahead with WeRemote, one of the things I could quickly put together was a status page. This is essential for any service users depend on.
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/ Productivity / Remote Work

Presence: The Silent Productivity Killer

One of the worst habits that somehow made its way from the office into remote work is “presence”. There is this innate expectation that if you’re online and in the chat rooms you’re working. Unfortunately slack and similar communication environments have become a cesspool of endless threads where nobody is able to explain an idea from start to finish because it is covered by all the “aham”, “I get it”, “yes” or “random cat gif” replies.
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/ CoronaDiary / Health

Avoiding depression while working remotely

One of the biggest complaints of first-time remote workers is the lack of delineation between work time and personal time. The feeling of being on a hamster wheel. There could be multiple causes for it. Underlying mental health conditions, or the person is an extrovert and now they have to cope with working from their home with little to no contact with the outside world — this can be tormenting for extroverts like myself. But most of the times, the hamster-wheel feeling is caused by something way less important or impactful, that can be dealt with if you have a bit of discipline.
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/ Remote Work / Recruiting

When recruiters don't share...

Stop for a moment and think deeply whether you have a friend who's been looking for a job for a long time. This is a reality for many people. I've met 5 in the last month alone. Some of them have been looking for so long that they're willing to take on almost any job, although they're highly skilled in a different field. They are so desperate that they're willing to dumb down their CV, just so they can get a job and not get turned out because they're overqualified.
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/ Opinion

Remote work during COVID19: A long Zoom call sprinkled with work breaks

With this prolonged period of wfh many managers are left without the one thing that made them feel productive — the meeting room. I bet many of them are suffering from seizures as I'm writing this article, knowing that tomorrow is Monday and all they have on their calendar is a couple of video calls. Unfortunately, many have found a way to have their meeting room — they turned Zoom or whatever video conferencing software they're using into a virtual meeting room. And they're holding people hostages for hours over there, clarifying and directing and feeling important.
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/ CoronaDiary

CoronaDiary #4

A late fourth issue, but still coming out when it's supposed to go out — Friday. Looks like morale tends to go down towards the end of the week — could it be because there's no weekend to look up to? Or the fact that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is rising in Romania?
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/ CoronaDiary

CoronaDiary #3

Third CoronaDiary issue, morale is good, and we have some new faces writing over here — actually names, since there are no photos. Looks like morale is good, except for a person whose whole attitude almost always "meh-with-a-hefty-dose-of-skepticism" — but we think that's what makes her so special 🐈😸. On to the status updates, and do read on until the end, as I have a couple o very special recommendations to share with you.
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/ CoronaDiary

CoronaDiary #2

Second day of the covid-19 induced social isolation and the second #CoronaDiary day. People's morale seems to be good, and most of us are firing on all cylinders! Hopefully, we'll keep this state of mind until the end of this period and afterwards, when we'll all work remotely because everyone realized we can do so even in the toughest of industries.
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/ CoronaDiary

CoronaDiary #1 — March 16, 2020

First day of remote working for a host of people who've either dreamed of working remotely, or were planning to ask their bosses for this type of work. Looks like nature got ahead of us and decided to ask our governments, directly, for remote work. This article contains the submissions for Day 1 of the CoronaDiary initiative, and at the end of the article, I placed a couple of useful tips and techniques.
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/ CoronaDiary

Starting the #CoronaDiary movement

This is the starting post for the #CoronaDiary movement, which is something we at WeRemote.EU are trying to push forward, to help all the people who have recently been thrown into the remote work world navigate social isolation and other problems they might face. We are highly committed to helping both people as well as organizations deal with mental health, from the perspective of people who are on the front lines, living through difficult situations, being remote workers ourselves. What we ultimately want to achieve with this movement is to foster an environment where people feel safe to share their experiences and their shortcomings regarding working remotely, and where they can also receive help form others who have walked the same path before them. And we want to keep people sane so they can push through this period of self-isolation, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.
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/ Software Engineering / Databases

Using archives to back up and restore a MongoDB database

Database backups are important. Data loss is a frequent issue and a frequently overlooked item when migrating servers, changing technologies or upgrading libraries. Until it happens. We recently added the ability for companies and professionals to create accounts on the platform and struggled ourselves with backing up our database and now we are sharing what we learned with you.
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/ Updates

Taking a look at 2019 🎉 + 🙏 + 🙃

I started this project, by myself, back in April. I managed to get a working version in about 3 weeks. The reaction to the original version was amazing. A lot of people chimed in, helped with feedback and professional advice. I've had designers, product people, project managers share their thoughts about WeRemote. This is one of the reasons WeRemote.eu exists.
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/ Remote Work / Product development

Why businesses with single technical founders fail

As techies, we’re accustomed to writing neat code, respecting best practices, following guidelines and asking for clear requirements each and every time. But this shines a bad light on us when we try to go the entrepreneurial route. It doesn’t matter if we’re building the next <insert-social-media-network-name> or that we’re building Uber but for <insert-weird-made-up-industry-name>, it has to be perfect. If possible, it has to be even better than the thing we’re cloning. We all know those developers from Facebook store their passwords in plain text… we’re going to encrypt everything thrice! What all of this does is kill “done” and “good enough”. And more often than not, good enough is all we need to validate a market, to see if there’s potential, or to serve that market directly.
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/ Remote Work

What are the most difficult things about working remotely?

Working remotely is amazing but it also comes with its challenges. Just like I read in a book, a while back, "solutions don't exist, only tradeoffs". Remote work is also a tradeoff. Just like when you're migrating from a monolith to a microservices architecture (software architecture), you're actually trading off system reliance (monolith) for network reliance (microservices). This article outlines a couple of the most difficult things about working remotely and provides a couple of points on how to mitigate these drawbacks.
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/ Product development

Build half a product, not a half-assed product

Working in corporate taught us that products should be launched feature-complete, zero-bugs, sound architecture, scalability in place and with all the bells and whistles. This was also my thinking until I read "Remote: Office Not Required" and "Rework" by the duo behind Basecamp — David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. It’s in one of these books, where I first encountered the expression “build half a product, not a half-assed product”.