Weekly Edition #001
Remote jobs, tools, resources and carefully handpicked inspirations and freely delivered to your inbox.
Things are rapidly changing, hope you all safe out there, washing your hands, keeping your social distance in check all the time. These are very strange and unpredictable times, but be aware of How Your Immune System Reacts to Coronavirus and what it means for treatment. The New York Times published articles on What You Can Do About Coronovirus Right Now and Coronavirus Tips: Frequently Asked Questions and Advice go check it out. All Coronavirus related articles moved out of the subscription zone and currently free on their website.
For more information on the novel coronavirus and Covid-19, visit cdc.gov.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. So, here we go.
In this week’s edition:
🌎 Remote jobs, work is where home is now.
🛠 Tools, making our lives easy.
🧠 Articles, for mind-food.
💎 TED Talks, brilliant people educate and inspire.
🤔 Words, stuck with us.
🎶 Music, playing on the loop.
📰 What else, news all around our planet.
Remote jobs fresh this week
Featured 📌
Thorn is looking for Data Scientist
Modulz is looking for Product Engineer
Ghost is looking for Visual Designer
Crossover is looking for Chief Operating Officer
Codelitt is looking for UX / UI Designer
Scopic is looking for Senior Web Developer
GitHub is looking for Senior Manager, Design Infrastructure
InVision is looking for Lead Product Manager, Studio
VidIQ is looking for Data Engineer
Signal is looking for iOS Developer
More 🔍
Senior Product, UX, and Front-end Engineer @ Hubstaff
Customer Support and Admin Support @ Hubstaff
Ruby on Rails Software Engineer @ Hubstaff
Data Analyst, Product @ GitLab
Software Developer – Python, Linux, Shell Scripting @ Capgemini
Project Manager – Cyber Security Services @ Capgemini
Technical Customer Success Manager @ Memberstack
Backend Engineer @ Memberstack
Frontend Engineer @ Memberstack
Technical Platform Experts @ Memberstack
Senior ReactJS Engineer @ Codelitt
Mobile App Developer( iOS / Android) @ 19 Agency Creatives
Senior UI/UX Designer @ Rocket Effect
Graphic Designer for Digital Marketing @ Rocket Effect
Graphic Designer @ Dan Lok
Web Designer @ Dan Lok
Graphic Designer @ BBXX
💡 Notion Tip: Stay on top of job applications with this template. (Also great for tracking internship apps!) If you don’t have an account, sign up here and get $10 in credits to get started.
Tools we loved this week
Apple coming out of nowhere with a solid coronavirus symptoms checker. This tool can help you understand what to do next about COVID-19.
Let’s all look out for each other by knowing our status on the virus, trying not to infect others, and reserving care for those in need.
🖥 Vagon
Your computer, just better. Vagon is your personal high-performance computer on the cloud. Start Vagon instantly and run all challenging software from any device, anywhere.
🎧 Brain.fm
Functional music to improve, focus in 15 minutes. This science-first approach creates music that sounds different–and affects your brain differently–than any other music.
💌 Help Scout
A better way to talk with customers. With Help Scout you can share email inboxes with your team, live chat with visitors, and create self-service content — all in one place.
🗓 Zvite
Schedule meetings instantly. Zvite is the fast, modern way to find the perfect meeting time.
⏱ Timeular
Discover where your time really goes. Ever wonder where the day’s gone to? Timeular is the easy way to track time and improve how it’s spent. Capture your time by flipping the Tracker, understand where it goes with their apps and uses the data to submit timesheets, bill your time or be more productive.
🔗 Kutt
Kutt your links shorter. Manage links, set custom domains and view stats, free & open source.
🖋 Just-Sign
Build your email signature in less than 60 seconds. Use this to make your custom and ready-to-use email signature for your professional use. Just create your signature, and copy & paste to your email account.
💬 Twist
Tame the chaos of your team communication. Imagine a distraction-free teamwork app. Where conversations stay organized and on-topic. And where information is easy to find, forever. That’s Twist.
🖥 Screen
Work together like you’re in the same room. Screen is a fast screen sharing with multiplayer control, drawing & video. Screen lets you work together like you’re in the same room. Unlike video conferencing tools that are designed for presentation, Screen lets everyone participate through multiplayer drawing & control.
🧠 Brainio
Note taking and mind mapping combined in one app. Mind mapping is a powerful technique aimed at improving learning capability. Brain does not think linearly or sequentially like a computer; it thinks multilaterally. It also works visually. Thanks to mindmaps, your brain is able to make great leaps of understanding and imagination through association. Mindmaps allow you to see the big picture but also focus on detail when you need.
Articles we read this week
Coronavirus: How to stay healthy and productive when working from home
Ness Labs
Coronavirus is forcing many companies to send their employees home. While remote work has been on the rise in the past few years, the pandemic is undeniably giving it a boost, and people around the world are discovering the joys and challenges of working from home.
The first few days, it feels like heaven: working in your pyjamas, eating your favourite snacks, even taking a little nap when you’re tired—how amazing! But after a week, many people report lower levels of productivity, loneliness, back pain, and even weight gain. How can you stay healthy and productive when working from home?
Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
Doc Searls Weblog
As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well. Hats off.
But Zoom is also—correctly—taking a lot of heat for its privacy policy, which is creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech). Two days ago, Consumer Reports, the greatest moral conscience in the history of business, published Zoom Calls Aren’t as Private as You May Think. Here’s What You Should Know: Videos and notes can be used by companies and hosts. Here are some tips to protect yourself. And there was already lots of bad PR.
Also another read on OneZero is also questioning that Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts: Are Your Remote Work Apps Spying on You?
The Remote Work Report by GitLab: The Future of Work is Remote
GitLab
Created to foster collaboration, innovation and evolution in the future of work, the 2020 Global Remote Work Report dissects the state of distributed work and surfaces key motivators for both employees and employers.
This year, over 3,000 respondents – across various industries, roles, and geographic locations – candidly shared their experiences, creating a platform for understanding how remote is changing society, and how individuals interact with their vocation.
By uncovering best practices and unmet needs, The Remote Work Report has synthesized the invaluable contributions from thousands of professionals allowing leaders to remove roadblocks and help teams thrive in a post-office world.
Ambition: why some people are most likely to succeed
TIME
A fire in the belly doesn't light itself. Does the spark of ambition lie in genes, family, culture--or even in your own hands? Science has answers.
Of all the impulses in humanity's behavioral portfolio, ambition — that need to grab an ever bigger piece of the resource pie before someone else gets it — ought to be one of the most democratically distributed. Nature is a zero-sum game, after all. Every buffalo you kill for your family is one less for somebody else's; every acre of land you occupy elbows out somebody else. Given that, the need to get ahead ought to be hard-wired into all of us equally.
Social distancing is slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too
Quartz
As governments around the world have pushed their citizens away from populated places to slow the spread of Covid-19, they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseases, such as the seasonal flu.
But they have been, according to data from Kinsa Health, a company that has sold or given away more than 1 million smart thermometers in the US. Kinsa collects anonymized thermometer readings (via its app, which users connect to the device) from its active user base to estimate the share of people that are ill in different geographies. By comparing current thermometer readings to historical trends, researchers have used Kinsa’s data to predict flu outbreaks weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveillance program, which uses hospitalization records.
4 exercises for your remote design sprint
Inside Design by InVision
Making sure your team is working towards the same goal is critical in any work environment. And when you’re fully remote like us at InVision, you sometimes need to get creative to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Creativity is dependent on the remashing and remixing of ideas, and a good in-person creative ideation session is an incredible boon to a product team. But when you’re remote, you have to recreate the magic using real-time collaboration tools.
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
GitHub
It's 2020, and browsers can do amazing stuff. This repo contains a non-exhaustive list of less-known features implemented in browsers today. This list isn't intended for a technical audience; instead, it wants to be an "I didn't know we could do that in a browser!" list.
How remote work can impact our fight against climate change
taskade blog
Remote work and climate change are stapled topics for anyone paying attention to the news. Talking heads just love debating how the two are shaping our immediate and more distant future.
But did you know that climate change and a preference for working remotely are not just running in parallel tracks? In fact, they can influence each other in a meaningful way.
The coronavirus crisis proves the internet should be a public utility
Quartz
Imagine if you had no internet access in this time of global crisis. It would be bad, right? For one thing, you couldn’t read this story. More importantly, you’d be in some form of quarantine unable to access information, with far fewer distractions and means to connect with others, and no way to work (if indeed your job has moved online in these difficult times). And if you were an indigent parent, you wouldn’t be able to maintain some semblance of continuing education for your children. You’d be struggling—alienated and uninformed—much more so than you may already be.
The spread of the novel coronavirus around the world has made many of us shut-ins and proven conclusively that the internet should be a public utility. It’s a basic necessity in the 21st century, like running water, gas, and electricity. Indeed, the United Nations in 2016 declared that internet access is a human right.
Working remotely: what we’ve learned after 8 years
Thorn Blog
Eight years ago, when Thorn was founded, we challenged ourselves to find the best talent to support this mission, regardless of geography. It was this decision that led us to become a distributed organization.
Today, this team works from 18 U.S. cities and in 3 countries. For our first segment of Working Remotely, we asked staff for tips on getting started that help them feel most successful working from home. Below are a few favorite practices we’ve learned along the way. We hope they help.
The coronavirus spares most kids. These theories may help explain why
National Geographic
Experts weigh in on the biological reasons children could be better protected from severe cases of COVID-19.
Across geographies, genders, and occupations, the new coronavirus is an indiscriminate infector. COVID-19 appears to plague people ubiquitously—including children who, despite hopeful early reports, do not seem more immune to the virus. The latest figures from China, where the outbreak began last year, suggest that those under the age of 18 may contract the pathogen at comparable rates to adults.
TED talks we watched this week
How to be your best self in times of crisis | Susan David
"Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility," says psychologist Susan David. In a special virtual conversation, she shares wisdom on how to build resilience, courage and joy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Responding to listeners' questions from across the globe, she offers ways to talk to your children about their emotions, keep focus during the crisis and help those working on the front lines. (This virtual conversation is part of the TED Connects series, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers. Recorded March 23, 2020)
The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates
In 2014, the world avoided a horrific global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers -- plus, frankly, thanks to some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. So, now's the time, Bill Gates suggests, to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training. As he says, "There's no need to panic ... but we need to get going."
What makes a hero? | Matthew Winkler
What trials unite not only Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins but many of literature's most interesting heroes? And what do ordinary people have in common with these literary heroes? Matthew Winkler takes us step-by-step through the crucial events that make or break a hero.
The first 20 hours, How to learn anything | Josh Kaufman
Josh Kaufman is the author of the #1 international bestseller, 'The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business', as well as the upcoming book 'The First 20 Hours: Mastering the Toughest Part of Learning Anything.' Josh specializes in teaching people from all walks of life how to master practical knowledge and skills. In his talk, he shares how having his first child inspired him to approach learning in a whole new way.
Depression, the secret we share | Andrew Solomon
"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment." In a talk equal parts eloquent and devastating, writer Andrew Solomon takes you to the darkest corners of his mind during the years he battled depression. That led him to an eye-opening journey across the world to interview others with depression -- only to discover that, to his surprise, the more he talked, the more people wanted to tell their own stories. (Filmed at TEDxMet.)
Words captured our minds this week
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
― Maya Angelou
American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist.
Music stayed on the loop this week
© 2020 Fazil Say, under exclusive license to Parlophone Records Limited
© 2019 Pink Floyd (1987) Ltd., under exclusive license to Parlophone Records Limited.
What else
Zoom is sending data to Facebook even if users don't have FB accounts, Vice reports. (After the news, Zoom updates iOS app to remove code that sent device data to Facebook.)
Dyson is building 15,000 ventilators to fight COVID-19.
Apple says customers must wait to pick up repairs locked inside its retail stores.
Stanford researchers created a new brain-machine interface that uses microwires and an external silicon chip to record electrical brain activity.
Qualcomm’s latest chips could make noise cancellation standards on new wireless earbuds.
OneWeb launched 34 satellites into space Saturday but is rumored to be on the brink of bankruptcy.
Plex makes live TV free for three months, you'll just need an antenna to watch through the app.
NASA tasks SpaceX with sending cargo and supplies to the future lunar space station.
Stay home and safe, work remotely, eat brain food and keep learning with this list of 130+ free online courses.
Till next Sunday. 🖖
Cover illustration by Tyler Elise Blinderman
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