I just read Mike Davidson’s great post on remote work advice after a year of it at Invision. I realized I’ve been remote for four and a half years at Slack and before that I ran my own company from my home office and before that I worked remotely as well. Since I moved to Oregon in 2003, I haven’t worked in a traditional office and I wanted to share the things I’ve learned.

A dedicated space is vital

The most important thing that made this a stable, reliable, and workable option in my life was getting a dedicated room in my house set aside for work. Having a home office with a door that cut me off (mostly) from whatever else was going on in the house was key to making it all work.

I freelanced for years in San Francisco from a desk in the center of a tiny apartment and my work was inconsistent. It was always a challenge to concentrate and get into a flow with distractions everywhere. Later in Oregon, I had a larger apartment with my own loft space dedicated to my desk, but it was still open to the rest of the apartment’s various noises and continued to derail me.

When I moved into a new house in 2005 that had a dedicated home office with a door (just like any other bedroom, but with no closet), everything changed. Now I had a place to work, even if my commute was just down some stairs. I could shut the door and have a quiet space, even when I had a toddler in the house early on. The door is mostly glass, but my family knows if it’s closed completely that I’m in a meeting. Having a glass door was a good middle-ground between total isolation and still knowing what’s going on in the house, so if something urgent was happening I could see it and help out.

Simply put, having a dedicated space lets you do more concentrated work, take video meetings in peace and quiet, and also helps separate your work from your home life when you have a room as a work-only space.

Coworking spaces are ok, but far from perfect

I want to mention coworking desks because it’s not a bad solution for remote employees. You get a work space that isn’t in your home that you can commute to, you can interact with others, and you still get your work done. After trying out a few different options, I found that even though coworking spaces were slightly cheaper than trying to get your own small office, it wasn’t drastically cheaper. Where I live, a very small office might run $400-500/mo while a coworking desk is closer to $250-300/mo.

Coworking’s biggest problem for me is how you have video meetings in peace and quiet. At a busy coworking space, often people put on headphones in the middle of a large table full of people and just participate in their meetings. I find that behavior obnoxious and of the three coworking spaces I’ve experienced, all had different options for “a quiet room” that ranged from hard-to-get free phone booths to requiring you to book a private space for a meeting (some charging up to $50 per half hour).

Being remote means you’re going to have a lot of video meetings, and this is where a very small private office somewhere for slightly more money can make more sense.

Pro Tip: Your local library is like a coworking space, but free

Most local libraries (ideal ones are college libraries open to the public) have decent wifi, desks, and places to work alone for no cost. Doing video meetings is still an issue, but it’s a great place to work without bothering anyone or being bothered. I tend to listen to white noise (from Noisli) on headphones and I can get more focused work done in a small cubicle study desk than even my own home office. The college library I often work out of even has dedicated quiet rooms I can borrow for occasional meetings when students aren’t using them.

Remember to get out and interact with people

Six months after I started working from home, I was at a cocktail party when someone asked what I do and how things were going and I suddenly clammed up. I stammered out something and later I realized I had become terrible at making small talk by being out of practice on my own.

Ever since, I’d made a point of getting out of the house every day even if it’s wall-to-wall meetings and I built into my budget going out to eat lunch in town most weekdays, just to regularly interact with strangers.

It may sound silly to extroverts, but I warn everyone who starts working remotely for the first time to remember to keep deliberately practicing small talk by interacting with strangers because it’s way too easy to fall into a hermit lifestyle in your own space.

Video is important and worth taking seriously

Video conferencing has been awful for 25 years but in the last few years Zoom has really transformed video for meetings by just being reliable and smooth and is a killer tool I use many times a week. Zoom is now my lifeline to colleagues and for something that important, take it more seriously than using the default camera that came with your laptop.

Have a clean, clear room as people may obsess about what’s behind you

Place your desk in your home office so your background has very little clutter. Be careful of windows since it can throw off your camera’s exposure and make you look weird when backlit.

Find a webcam with the widest possible angle camera lens

In modern offices you’ll often be shown in a room on a 65″ TV monitor and it wasn’t until I was visiting an office and I was in a meeting with someone else working remotely when I realized just how HUGE the remote person’s head was when they’re the only one on video.

Zoom’s office video cameras are extremely wide-angle so you can fit a whole room in, and you’ll want to shoot for your head taking up less than 50% of the frame, and a wide-angle lens is key in your home office as well. An old GoPro can make a great super wide-angle webcam, but it’s kinda tricky to setup. My favorite nearly-as-wide 4K webcam with an easy setup is the Logitech Brio. It’s plug and play on a Mac and it’s less than $200. You’ll get better color and lighting in video than a default laptop camera, and going wide-angle also means your head won’t be 4 feet tall on a monitor in the main office, since there will be more of your surroundings in the shot.

Light yourself

Another pro tip: put a Seasonal Affective Disorder light on your desk, next to your monitor but aimed at you will brighten your face up considerably. Trust me, you’ll look much better with some light on you (and maybe by accident in the winter you’ll feel better—who knows).

Apple AirPods, 1000% percent

Apple AirPods are the best simple headphone/mic combo that works great with Macs and Zoom. Your ears won’t sweat or overheat like over-the-ear headphones and the newest ones can run for 2-3 hours between charges. They’re so small they barely show up on video and without wires to trip you up, you can move around as needed during a meeting. They’re pretty much perfect for video conferencing, even if you think they look silly (and yeah, they’re a tad expensive).

Remote is better for some roles, unfortunately

Mike mentioned this in his post, but I would agree with him that today, remote jobs tend to favor more senior, specialized positions where it’s easy for someone with lots of experience to take on a self-directed role. My current one is ideal for remote work, where as a senior writer with 20+ years of experience I can go off to write by myself for hours, and it doesn’t really matter where I am doing the work. Other writers on my team tend to do the same, working frequently from home or in the office library—wherever they do their best work—and it’s rarely at their office desk.

For now, it’s likely harder for junior employees in new roles to have a great experience while working remote at most companies, but I hope it’s changing as remotes roles become more accepted and companies implement it in a thoughtful manner. In 5-10 years this should be much more accessible to junior positions but it may be a bit more of a challenge finding jobs that support you remotely for now.

It sucks being the odd one out

I work for a big company with offices around the globe so whenever we have cross-functional meetings, having 3-4 people in various locations over video conference is the norm, and those are the easiest meetings to feel equal with your colleagues. On smaller projects and in smaller teams, I’m often the only person not in the main office and those are tougher. I don’t know why but it gets WAY easier if there’s at least one more person on video with a larger team in the main office. Just something to keep in mind—when you’re the only remote person on a team, you’ll have to do extra work to feel like you’re on equal footing with your office coworkers.

A good Slack team makes it all possible (but only if it’s good)

I’m biased of course (I work at Slack), but a Slack-first company where everyone communicates in Slack and tracks projects in Slack and does standup meetings in Slack makes being remote as close as humanly possible to being in the office. The first time I visited Slack’s early SF office, I couldn’t believe how quiet it was, since everyone was “talking” in Slack instead of over their desks. It made it easy to work from home, since I knew I wasn’t missing much aside from hallway rumors, as everything else took place in Slack.

It does require discipline in how your company uses Slack. It’s good to have a bit of water-cooler chat in #random, but also have a team channel with your immediate colleagues where you check in with each other every morning. For distributed teams, doing work in project-focused channels is a great way to coordinate everyone’s efforts. It also helps to have a culture where asynchronous communication is OK. Not every Slack conversation I have with others has the expectation they’ll answer me immediately. In fact, in my own team of writers, we tend to chatter away in Slack the first hour of our work day, then it slows to a trickle until the end of the day with people checking in and updating everyone on their work before they head home. There are times where I get 3-4 hours in the middle of the day without a single ping from Slack, and it’s only because everyone is conscientious of how and when they choose to alert others. It takes a lot of discipline and practice and people that are thoughtful about how they work together.

Touching base with the mothership helps a lot

I know a lot of remote-first companies do giant company trips where everyone meets face-to-face and they plan their work ahead together in person, and some companies do that once a year and some do it twice a year. Over the past few years, I’ve found an ideal cadence for me is going down to San Francisco every 1-2 months for a couple days of meetings. It’s only an hour-long flight for me, but I find if I haven’t been down to SF in 3 or 4 months, I start to feel a bit out of touch with my team. I tend to pack my days in the office with meetings with people from all over the company and we typically plan the next few months of work. I find the best type of work in person is brainstorm sessions where the ideas come fast and loose. You can still do those meetings as a video chat, but they just work better when everyone is in the same room riffing off each other.

Work/home balance is an obvious problem

One of the thorniest issues working from home is learning to separate your work hours from your home hours. At an office, the change of location and scenery makes it obvious. At home, I feel weird taking a whole hour to get lunch. I tend to check in on things at night, and sometimes I start my workdays early. Studies show remote workers tend to work 10-20% more from home because it’s so easy to lose track of your time.

It took years of working way too much from home and having trouble shutting down from work mode to realize I do my best work when I give myself boundaries. Maybe it’s don’t start work until 9am or walk out of your home office every day at 6pm and don’t return until the next morning. It might be no laptops or phones after dinner. Whatever system you devise, figure out your guardrails to protect your off-hours. When I ran my own company I didn’t have an unplugged weekend for over a decade and it was awful for me and all the relationships around me. These days, I relish my time off and the more I wall off personal time from my work hours, the more diligently I can work during the day.

Don’t forget to move around

Another obvious one is you need to build exercise into any remote work arrangement. When you’re not commuting and you’re in your own place you’re going to walk much less. About a decade ago I started going to a gym with a trainer waiting for me twice a week in early mornings. We mostly do core and flexibility work, and it keeps me from getting injured whenever I go out and do physical things like cycling, running, or kayaking. Without a trainer, I couldn’t motivate myself to do this regularly, so that part is key to make it stick for me.

Outside of gym days, I also try to do before or after work exercise, and this year it’s been early morning runs and weekend cycling, and during summer months I try to ride my bike around town as much as possible.

---

The benefits of remote work can’t be ignored. You get to live where you want and support your family without having to spend a lot of time away from them commuting to an office. On the flip side, the company gets the best possible person for the job and it’s probably cheaper for them in the long run, but every company is different in how they support remote employees. Depending on the role and the company, it can be a challenge to feel connected and part of the greater team and takes constant upkeep. It’s been a great experience for me personally, and I hope it becomes the norm for a lot more people and companies in the future.

These days, pretty much every bar or restaurant with outdoor seating has some string lights set up for mood lighting, and though I’ve always liked the look of them, in the past they’ve tended to be kinda expensive for a long string of them. But with cheap LEDs becoming increasingly prevalent, they’re getting cheaper and cheaper.

I recently picked up a 100-foot long string of lights on Amazon for $57 and they’ve really transformed my backyard. You never know what you’re gonna get when you buy something cheap but so far they work great, plus they shipped with 4-5 extra bulbs that came in handy when I accidentally broke one of the hundred lights.

For warm nights in Summer, we’ve now got our backyard deck lit up as well as a gravel path to a second deck at the end of the yard after stringing the lights among the rafters then through the trees.

Fuckin’ Juncos ate all the seed.

God, the Scrub Jays are THE WORST!

Yeah that hummingbird looks nice but he terrorizes the smaller ones. Total dick.

I have jealousy for friends that have a nemesis who is some kind of bird. And it’s usually not a single bird, but more often an entire species.

When I hear phrases like these from friends it’s a reminder that my priorities are somewhat out of whack.

I wish I had a bird nemesis!

I wish I watched my backyard garden enough that I not only noticed the birds, but could build a hierarchical list of species ranked by relative worth of bird, identifying the one I should hate.

#birdgoals

For no reason, a list of things I’ve done in California since being born there in 1972:

• Stood atop Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states
• Climbed Half Dome too which has cables as handrails on the top and it’s terrifying to climb down, climbed Lassen Peak, climbed Mt San Jacinto many times, made it about 3/4 up Mt. Shasta before sliding down, climbed Mt Baldy in the summer, and Mt. San Gorgonio
• Swam in Lake Tahoe
• Hiked the Lost Coast hours north of SF where the fog is so thick it sits on tops of giant trees where it condenses and falls to the ground so it basically rains 24/7 all year round
• Partied in San Bernardino
• Attended Mule Days in Bishop many years in a row
• Stayed at Harris Ranch, a hotel inside of a cattle lot in the central valley where it was well over 110ºF each day while smelling like a cow’s intestines
• Cruised the main drag in Palm Springs in a lowered mini truck (my truck—sorry)
• Stood at the base of the Golden Gate bridge while holding a laptop like a pizza for a NYT photographer
• Hiked the Anza-Borrego desert
• High school ditch day entailed going to Raging Waters in San Dimas where we remembered to be excellent to each other
• Dug 6 foot deep pits for soil samples way outside of Yreka near the northern border while cows wandered around us 50 miles from nowhere on BLM land
• Rode my bike down to the California/Oregon border on the coast
• Backpacked at Joshua Tree and hiked miles to an oasis that we had to find and pump water out of because we’d run out
• Rode out the 1994 Northridge earthquake on the 21st floor of a hotel at Universal Studios, which caused all the glass on the building to shatter, and because I ran out of the hotel barefoot, I had to live out a Die Hard fantasy I never wanted to actually experience
• Opened my sunroof so I could smell the orange blossoms whenever I drove through the orange tree orchards north of Riverside every Spring
• Proposed on top of Mt. Tamalpais
• Whale watched out of Long Beach (and saw lots of whales)
• Ran the Death Valley half marathon but got on the wrong bus to the start and ended up running 20 miles through abandoned mines down to the finish line
• Camped in Big Sur
• Watched 1992 Bill Clinton on the campaign trail drive into a private fundraiser in a Beverly Hills home while standing on the curb out front with Robert Downey Jr.
• Did aquatic and sediment chemistry research on Lake Elsinore, the only natural lake in all of Southern California (every other one is man-made, all of them) where I also learned to water ski as a teen
• Raced bikes at Candlestick park before they tore it down
• Met Huell Howser at a chili cook-off in El Toro
• Got a poster signed by Neil Finn backstage at a Crowded House show in Hollywood
• As a kid my dad drove us all up to Half Moon Bay then asked where the giant rock was and was told by a state park ranger that we were looking for Morro Bay with its rock about 4 hours south
• Scuba dived in Laguna
• Ran the LA Marathon and vowed never to run another marathon ever again because even after years on cross country teams and numerous 5k and 10k and half marathon races it was just too much running for one day
• Went tide-pooling in La Jolla many times
• Watched the sun rise at Mono Lake
• Got a concussion bailing out on a BMX jump in Huntington Beach
• Went to Disneyland about 100 times
• Worked at UCLA
• Worked in SOMA (SF)
• Worked in Mountain View
• Worked at Stanford
• Got an associates degree in Hemet
• Got a bachelors degree in Riverside
• Got a masters degree in Riverside
• Got married in San Diego

As I looked out of the back window of a Lyft as I crossed the Potomac, it was the first time in my entire life that I got to see Washington DC in person.

I immediately laughed.

So much marble. So much pomp and circumstance. A city carved from stone standing as a beacon made to look like the Greeks designed it over two thousand years ago?

It was all a bit nonsensical at first glance.

What first popped in my mind was Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. It looked almost fake, like a movie set.

Everything in marble, designed to last for thousands of years, looking like it was always there, but largely built when the country had barely formed.

And where did they get the money? Could you imagine today if a developing country was in a prolonged war, then won it unexpectedly, and proceeded to build an opulent capital city out of the finest materials before they’d barely developed their first laws or established their banking system?

Ooooooh right. Free labor is how they did it. Funny I never heard this in my history classes growing up.

---

The National Museum of African American History and Culture was incredible. You have to reserve tickets online at 6AM to get in the same day but it’s a really great set of exhibits in a beautiful building.

The museum’s basement begins with a story I’ve never heard examined before, the prehistory of American slavery, from the 1400-1600s and how Europeans gradually built the slave trade.

The rest of the exhibits didn’t go as hard as the Whitney Museum did, but I walked with an afternoon tour and it covered the highlights of how gruesome slavery was and how much money it made and how it continues in many ways today.

The first few floors are pretty heavy, so it was good to see the upper levels of the museum celebrate black culture in many different facets.

When you leave the African American museum and you head to the National Gallery of Art next door, there’s a bunch of shaker furniture on display but after you’ve left a heavy exhibit about slavery, it’s kinda difficult to muster up appreciation for silly rich people stuff like fancy ass chairs.

---

By the way, the weekend we were in DC, there was a 100,000 strong motorcycle rally for “freedom” and you’d see old guys in leather vests walking around literally everywhere, but I never saw any of them at the MLK memorial or at the NMAAHC. I wonder why…

The Metro subway in DC was incredible. We happened to have a station right next to our hotel and getting all over the city was fast and easy. Every time we arrived at a station a train was no more than 4 minutes away. The only subway I’ve ever used that was this reliable was the London Underground. I’ve never experienced an American subway system that was so quick, easy, air conditioned, and beautiful. Also? I’ve NEVER been on a subway before that told you which side doors would open just as you approached each station. It was so human and so handy.

It’s a gorgeous subway from end to end, and it was really impressive and yet another reason why it reminded me of a foreign country’s system. I’ve never seen anything like this in America before.

---

The many memorials were incredible across the board, but I think the public doesn’t quite understand them when they’re first built and gets mired in criticism about where they were placed and how they might look, but that all goes away after they’ve been around for a couple decades. I remember controversies around several of them when they debuted but they’re revered now and I have no doubt the new MLK one will fall into the pantheon of celebrated works on the mall.

I got to visit the White House and it was a really weird experience. First off, you’ve got to find the secret gate entrance for visitors, then you have to wait in a long line for multiple levels of security screening. It was clear about half the people there were reluctantly visiting like me while half were definitely fans of Trump and happy to be there.

It was a trip to look at the buildings and know you’ve seen those same places in breaking news before. Oh that’s where he did the weird handshake with the French guy. Oh that’s where he did the stupid burgers for college football players. Oh, that’s where Obama would do the state of the union.

It was weird to be there during a large protest and be on the other side of the gates for it. I was glad to get away from there as fast as possible.

Also, I bet he hates seeing this prominent Bill Clinton portrait every day.

---

The portrait gallery was amazing.

I remember a wave of sadness hit me after seeing the Barack Obama portrait. It’s so beautiful and as bright and brilliant of a painting as the man is, and to think that he presided over Washington for eight years and now the shitshow clown we currently have gets to follow him—it was just a bit depressing to think we went from the best to worst so quickly.

---

The Air and Space museum kinda sucked because they’re going through such a large renovation, so it felt like only about half of the collection was on display with lots of boarded up rooms and hallways due to construction. I was happy to be reminded that the Wright Brothers were not only bike shop owners but also made a few bikes and they had one on display that would look at home at any current National Handmade Bike Show.

A highlight of my whole trip was getting a personal two hour tour of the Holocaust museum and the exhibit about how America reacted to Hitler, the war, and the holocaust from the creator of the exhibit. We got to learn why each display was selected and why it was there and how it related to the larger story along with the transitions between exhibits. Of course, viewing it today, it was easy to make parallels to current news, but the exhibit was created in 2014 and connecting the japanese internment camps to the ones you see today in El Paso, or the rhetoric found in headlines and speeches of Hitler that mimic a lot of the ways we talk about immigration in 2019 was entirely left to the viewer.

---

I so quickly got used to every museum being free. I remember going to London and being amazed that museums didn’t charge admission, but once you’re in DC and enjoying museum after museum after museum and there’s no charge for it, it just makes sense. You’ll never think of a completely different way to look at something until you get to experience it, and then it seems bananas we don’t do it everywhere. Why not use an endowment or sponsor or any way you can to keep a museum free and open to the public for all to enjoy and be educated? After a week of free museums, it’s going to feel weird to pay for a ticket at one in the future in other cities.

---

Food was expensive as fuck! Our group of three ate at a variety of places, from cheap pizza/italian to sidewalk cafes to fancy seafood joints. The bill for lunch or dinner at just OK places was frequently $60-70 with no alcohol. One lunch we splurged and it ended up costing $110 for fairly decent seafood but not what I’d expect for the money. This was all in the central district, so I’m sure it’s a bit of a tourist tax going on.

An outlier was going to an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant, buying a variety platter bigger than our table, buying a beer, and having the entire bill be only $22. I tipped $10 because they deserved it and it was frankly too cheap for such incredible food.

---

I’ve always wanted to visit DC and before a month ago, I never had the chance.

Actually, there was one chance where my fourth grade class all got to go to DC and I asked my parents but they didn’t have the money to cover it so I sat and read books at the school library for a week while my classmates enjoyed seeing government in the flesh. I resented my parents for years after for denying me this experience, but I never had the chance in all my travels as an adult to check out DC.

So it was great to finally see where laws are made and where people work in government and those kooky stone buildings that hold it all in.

What an utterly ridiculous but unforgettable place.

The Guardian asks “Are the Portland Thorns the ideal template for a women’s football club?” and it’s such a fucking no-brainer that every year I go to Thorns games I wonder why the entire women’s soccer league in America doesn’t use them as a blueprint to copy.

Thorns games are well-attended, always setting records in the league (last Sunday’s game I went to had a new league record 19,000 people). They’ve got a good team, but lots of other teams are good too, but have a fraction of attendance and support from fans (some teams get as few as 2,500 fans to show up).

Currently, the North Carolina Courage are the best team in the league. Let’s look at where they play.

Portland’s park at the top looks like a cross between a classic mid-tier city baseball stadium and a european soccer stadium. The Courage look like they play at a well-funded high school.

I’ve thought about this and Portland’s success boils down to a few key, simple concepts that can easily be replicated elsewhere.

1. Have both a MLS men’s soccer team and a NWSL women’s team in the same city to pool the two fanbases. The Portland Timbers are a big draw and so are the Thorns and there is plenty of crossover fans between the two. Soccer fans can enjoy both teams and games, but don’t cut your fans in half by putting a women’s team in a weird city with no corresponding base of soccer fans, and the same goes for the men, don’t expand to a non-soccer town with just one team, and make sure there are good college soccer teams in those cities too. Honestly, the NWSL and MLS should work together on this and only approve expansion cities that pair up teams to the same place, so one can help support the other and vice versa.

2. Share the men’s MLS team stadium with the NWSL women’s team. When you build a soccer stadium, both teams should share it. The Portland park is incredible, and the Timbers and Thorns switch off who gets the Saturday game and who gets to play on Sundays. That’s how every other city should do it.

Here’s where the Seattle Reign FC women’s team plays:

And here’s where the Seattle Sounders men’s team plays:

That’s messed up. This should be the rule: Two teams, one city, one stadium.

3. Add more women’s teams in obvious places. San Jose has a MLS team and a stadium but no women’s team. How can this be? This is totally bananas, given the huge population of fans in California and that Santa Clara University is nearby and was the subject of a whole film about women’s soccer. There’s definitely a big fanbase ready to embrace a new team there and it boggles my mind there’s nothing in San Jose and nothing in Los Angeles, which gets TWO mens teams. Anywhere there’s a strong women’s college team and an existing MLS team should be a good candidate for locating a pro women’s team.

Honestly, that’s all there is to the Portland Thorns’ success. Granted, Portland doesn’t have any pro football or baseball teams, but it has two top-tier women’s soccer programs at Portland State and U of Portland and they share a stadium with the existing MLS team.

Every other city and team in the MLS and NWSL could work like this and really draw the crowds to women’s soccer, which it goes without saying clearly outperforms the men’s US team in international play and deserves bigger salary caps once they start attracting bigger crowds by pooling fans and resources.

A friend recently asked me how they could take better photos.

First off, it’s better to think about making photos instead of taking photos. Where you choose to point a camera, how you zoom in and frame it, and at what time of day are all choices you make that influence the final shot. So it’s making, not just taking.

My main advice is often something like “go take 100,000 photos and then you’ll be good by the end of it” but while practice certainly helps, directed practice is better. Don’t just take more shots for the sake of more shots, try out different factors each time, make every shoot a set of experiments to get you more familiar with the possibilities. Find out what works and what doesn’t, and follow rules so you can later break them.

Never stop experimenting.

So my tips on how to take good shots boil down to three things:

• Light
• Framing
• Processing

Light

I had an epiphany when I was reading photo.net sometime in the late ’90s (it appears photo.net was sold off and changed greatly, but I think it was this old tutorial at Philip Greenspun’s site that opened my eyes). I liked Greenspun’s tutorials because they aren’t too focused on tech or lenses or f-stops directly but more about philosophical approaches and timeless advice on capturing a decent photograph no matter what device you’re using.

Much of getting a good shot is knowing how to deal with light. And Philip’s tutorials on light made me think more about it whenever I went out to take photos. Often I’d experience a moment and think “this looks amazing, let me get my camera” and I’d capture it, but I often revisit a place at several points in a day, like early morning, midday, and during “golden hour” just before sunset. On vacation, this means visiting a same spot 3-4 times to try and get a good photo. And then there are the familiar places near me that I’ve visited for years and years, at all times of day, hoping for just the right combo of light and clouds. There are trees and signs along bike rides that I know will look amazing in a shot someday but I haven’t captured yet and it might take three or four more years to get it right.

So yes, the best advice for getting better at photography is taking lots more shots all the time, but when you do it, notice how light plays with your subjects and try things at different times of day, with different lenses, with different lighting. If you want to try something bold, take a photo of the same tree every day for a month. Then try a shot of it for every hour the sun is up, then look back at them to see which worked the best and why.

Once you understand how light plays with a landscape or a portrait subject, you’re well on the way to getting better shots. There’s only so much VSCO or Lightroom can save, but if you can capture good lighting first, you’ll have a good photo even if you do nothing else right.

Framing

Once you know how light plays with a subject, framing your photo (and later, cropping) are your next areas to focus on when practicing.

The rule of thirds is a bit of a cliché, but when you’re shooting landscapes or candid photos it really does make for more compelling photos. Perfectly centered, symmetrical shots only work for certain subject matter and settings, while for most photos centering a subject makes it come out boring.

Waterfalls are a great example. Everyone wants to take a photo of a waterfall in the center of the frame, but it’s almost always more interesting if you shift the waterfall to one of the sides and put the horizon line/top of the waterfalls at the top 1/3rd.

---

Get low. Taking photos where the lens is five or six feet above the ground tend to come out boring because we’ve all seen that view before. I shoot most landscape photos at about belt-buckle level. I crouch down, shooting two or three feet above the ground to get a new perspective and make a more interesting photo.

---

Cropping is a skill you’ll pick up only after years of editing photos. For the first ten years I was taking lots of shots, I rarely ever cropped and tried to get everything framed perfectly in the viewfinder. Then as the rise of things like Instagram and mobile devices proved, getting things narrowed so your subjects appear “larger” on small screens became a skill I practiced for years, and now I almost always shoot a photo slightly wide on purpose so I can crop the best shot out of it later.

Processing

I’ll admit I don’t get too hung up on post-processing my photos, but ten years of iPhone filters and twenty years of photoshop before that certainly influence me and it’s a good skill to develop (no pun intended) to make your shots the best they can be. Basically I find a workflow in the smallest set of steps that get my photos to a better place as quickly as possible, so I can prep a photo in an instant, then post it and move on.

I’d urge everyone to experiment with all your options (try out Lightroom, VSCO, etc) until you settle on a look you like, and feel free to ask photographers doing something different that you enjoy for any tips. I found out blue filters do wonders for cycling shots and it’s a thing I would have never tried unless a friend shared his process with me.

I’m incredibly lazy and I don’t like to spend too much time on processing, but if it’s your jam, go with it. Shoot RAW and adjust histograms all day, and try out the hundreds of photo apps out there that can help streamline processing. I optimize for speed and convenience, but I often wish I spent more time on post-processing.

So that’s all there is. Pay close attention to these three main areas whenever you’re shooting photos. Tweak one of them each day, and return to places day after day to try more new things. Eventually, you’ll figure out how to make better photos and what works and doesn’t for you, and someday you’ll arrive somewhere for the first time, grab a quick shot, and it’ll look amazing even without days of shooting, all because you put in the work and know how to tweak your surroundings to help you get great shots.

I live in a ~2,500sqft house built in 2005, and it’s given me nothing but problems when it comes to wifi. My home office (where internet enters the house) is at one extreme corner of the first floor and no matter what I tried, the second floor’s opposite end of the house never could quite get decent WiFi signals.

For years, I tried various Netgear and Linksys WiFi base stations and Apple AirPort Extremes and I tried range extenders and powerline ethernet and early mesh networks with additional Airport Express points upstairs.

A few years ago when eero came out, I bought a set of three the day they debuted. At first, things were great, but when one point couldn’t see the other two momentarily, the whole thing would collapse. I started rebooting the points periodically to maintain decent wifi, but still I’d get dropouts every so often where you’d have a good connection to a point that couldn’t see the other two, so you’d have perfect wifi but no internet.

After a year of eero, I gave up and tried out Google’s WiFi mesh product, and it followed the same pattern. Even with four points (two per floor), getting decent enough wifi upstairs continued to be a problem, and my 200Mbps connection in my home office would end up being 10-20Mbps speeds on the upstairs floor (in between weekly dropouts where one point upstairs would fall off the network completely).

I finally decided to fix this once and for all.

Talking to friends with bulletproof home networks, they all relied on ethernet drops in every room along with a wireless access point system like those from Ubiquiti, which is a common system in offices, at conferences, in schools, and other public places with hundreds to thousands of people using them.

I didn’t want to go down the enterprise WiFi path at first, so I decided to convert my unused phone lines to ethernet to see how that could improve things. It took some tweaking, but I even got my Google WiFi home system to recognize the “ethernet backhaul” connections, but it didn’t improve WiFi speeds much, as Google’s WiFi continued to rely on the network mesh to spread the connection, ignoring the fast wired connection on each point. So my backroom would still putter at 15Mbps.

As a last ditch effort, I tried Ubiquiti’s home prosumer version called AmpliFi, wiring up two Amplifi HD access points, one on each floor setup in the “ethernet backhaul” configuration, but after hours of tweaking I could not get the first unit to properly connect to a network (I flashed the firmware to the latest, cloned the MAC address on the original router, and still, nothing). I returned them for refunds.

Finally, I gave in and bought a Ubiquiti UniFi system. This is no small feat because it takes some research to get right and I spent the last couple weeks reading forums and guides and watching tons of YouTube videos before compiling my own shopping list and checking that against what friends had in their homes.

I’d say this is a gold standard system for needs like mine, where I have 7 rooms with ethernet jacks and a fiber optic internet connection that terminates in a simple ethernet cable:

• Ubiquiti Security Gateway (USG) which acts as your router/DHCP server/firewall that hands out IP addresses to everything
• Ubiquiti CloudKey which is a tiny linux server that runs the monitoring software for your network, accessible from outside if you ever need to change something remotely
• Ubiquiti 8-port switch with PoE (power over ethernet) on all 8 ports
• 2 x Ubiquiti AC Pro WiFi Access Points (they come in half a dozen versions but the Pro model is fine for most uses) and I bought 2, one for each floor of my house

You have to buy all these parts to make it work. There are ways to skip or substitute others, but go with what’s easiest. In total this should run you about $700, depending on what packages Amazon offers.

Keep in mind there are cheaper options. At the lowest cost, you could just wire up two Ubiquiti AC Pro points and leave your routing to your existing network setup. This would run about $250. You could also save about $100 by going with Ubiquiti’s cheaper 8-port switch with only 4 PoE ports, bringing the full system down to about $600.

So with my equipment in hand, I watched a ton of videos, but this one is a great for its simplicity.

It’s still not perfectly simple, as you can skip some of the network changes he makes, but overall you can see how easy it is to make your connections in a configuration like this:

I took the ethernet coming off my fiber connection, plugged it into the USG, then ran a wire to the switch, then plugged in the CloudKey on an ethernet port in a room I wasn’t using. I plugged one AC Pro wifi point downstairs in my living room facing the backyard and one upstairs on the opposite end of the house. The great thing about PoE on every port is you can plug in an access point anywhere and not need a wall plug of any kind, since it gets power from ethernet.

I logged into the various administration screens as directed by the video, and updated the firmware on all devices. After about ten minutes of updates and basic configuration, everything was up and running perfectly.

Ubiquiti products are like swiss army knives with 10,000 blades. They’re incredibly flexible and can support almost any configuration you can imagine and if you just search for your specific need, and it’s fairly easy to find answers from someone that has done what you need before (I had to port forward for outside access to a media server that took some extra tweaking). Imagine it’s like a wifi system designed by people that use StackOverflow to look everything up.

I briefly tried Ubiquiti’s stuff out 5-7 years ago and it’s gotten way easier to configure, understand, and monitor, but you still have to do a bit of research after you get it set up. If you get stuck, it’s not too hard to find local computer IT help you can hire with experience on Ubiquiti devices since it’s so widely used.

On the positive side, once you have things set up, they’re good to go since there are tiny stable linux servers underneath it all. I am seeing perfect wifi in my house, and the room at the far end of my second floor that gave me so much grief is running over 150Mbps speeds now and I couldn’t be happier with this all.

It’s fairly expensive stuff for home WiFi, but it’s bulletproof, and reliable enough to be set-it-and-forget-it. Every year for the past 14 I’ve lived in my house I’ve spent a couple hundred bucks trying out all kinds of solutions but I wish I went with this sooner.

Day 2 was the big one and all signs pointed to everything going smoothly with perfect weather conditions for a launch later that day.

We started our day with a presentation and Q&A with retired astronaut Robert Curbeam, then we made our way to a telescope array where satellite data is beamed down continuously and we talked about the challenges of working with so much data.

Our last day trip before we trekked to the launch site was to visit an airfield and hanger. A highlight of this was when a C-130 cargo plane landed in the middle of our tour, and both the director of the airfield and the pilot jumped out and opened all the doors and waved us over to check out every nook and cranny. A cargo plane is a pretty specialized thing and it was great to see the cockpit and the cargo bays.

Finally, with the 4:46PM launch time, just before 3pm we started making our way to our launch viewing site. All morning, we could tell the roads were jammed near the NASA visitor center where the public was encouraged to go to see (it was maybe 4mi from the launch site). By the afternoon every road into the area was choked with traffic, and luckily we had back roads and special entrances to get onto Wallops Island.

By the way, if you’re not in a NASA-led group, I did notice the post office we passed just as we entered the facility had a really clear view and just an hour before launch maybe 30 people knew about it and were parked there. It’s here on Google Maps and from what I could see in the bus, it had a direct line of sight to the launch pad.

We got to our spot about 2 miles from the launch pad with a good clear view of it. NASA was kind enough to setup an event tent in the middle along with some bleachers and they even had wifi in the tent (cell networks were all jammed so this was a relief).

Every photographer ran off the buses into the marshland and people all stopped along a line where the ground was dry enough and stable for tripods. I grabbed a spot between tripods for my own camera, and setup my old Canon 5Dmk3 with a 70-200mm 2.8L lens on a cheap tripod I bought at Best Buy the night before.

At first I was a little freaked out, because my test photos of the rocket on the pad were showing up as blurry, but it was the effects of heat over 2 miles of land. Everyone’s zoomed in view was a little wavy. I was also worried because everyone in my group was running 600mm lenses and a lot of people had multipliers to get in tighter at around 1200mm.

I worried 200mm wasn’t enough, but in the end with the big sensor, I got perfectly fine shots of the launch I could crop down tighter, plus I didn’t have to precisely follow the rocket to keep it in frame of a zoomed in view. I’ll even go out on a limb and say you don’t necessarily need the 600mm+ zoomed in hardware, since I checked out the shots from others in the group and they suffered from the same heat effects and slight blurs as mine.

Finally, the time got closer and closer and then suddenly it was about to happen. I wrote up all my overwhelming feelings here, but even though I was warned, the weirdness of seeing the rocket launch but not hearing it for 10-15 seconds was a trip. Then the sound was louder and sharper than I thought it’d be. I must admit for the first 30 seconds of the launch I was 100% focused on getting photos, but once the rocket left the pad and the plume, I stumbled backwards and just laid down on the ground to watch it continue to climb. I kinda wish I could experience a launch without a camera to fully experience it, but maybe someday.

Afterwards, we slowly made our way back to the bus and then we were dropped off. The roads were still slammed in all directions heading out, so I headed back to my hotel and tried to find dinner. At the fourth restaurant I checked, I got a table and some seafood, and finally I attended the NASA TV press conference that night before finally heading to Washington DC for my last day of the trip.

This trip was fantastic, it was a life-changing event that I’m incredibly thankful for getting the opportunity to witness. The NASA crew was incredible throughout, giving us tours and talks and answering questions and being incredibly accommodating.

I would implore anyone wanting to experience this to follow @NASASocial and the main NASA accounts on Twitter. Every couple months they open signups for future launches and their program runs like a well-oiled machine after dozens of these launches. Keep in mind you do have to pay for all your travel and time, but if you’d like to help NASA get the word out on all your social networks, they may just approve you.

Everything since October 1957, when Sputnik streaked across the sky, has led to where we are today.

Sputnik led to our own satellites and then to vehicles that could hold animals, then people, then we could orbit the earth then we could orbit the moon, and then we could land on the moon. And then we made rockets that were reusable, and we kept flying. We used a science research station in Antarctica to test the possibility living on the moon. Or on Mars. And then we use the International Space Station to test the limits of how long we can survive in space for those longer trips.

Everything in spaceflight is an iterative experiment. Each new flight does a few new things for the very first time while also testing possibilities so future missions can create their own firsts.

Every flight builds on the shoulders of all the flights that came before it. It’s a slow process, but it works.

Gravity is a hell of a thing. Conceptually I knew a 50 ton rocket pushing 7600lbs up into the air would take a lot of thrust, but it’s not until you’re standing a couple miles away watching it happen that you realize just how much thrust it takes. 

Light travels much faster than sound, so you hear T-minus 3, 2, 1, and then you see a blast of smoke and then you see the rocket rise and then you see the flame, and being two miles away, it takes about 12-15 seconds for the blast at the speed of sound to reach you. For a long moment your eyes deceive your ears and you wonder if any of this is real. Then you hear the sound. Then you feel the sound.

I’ve never heard a sound like this before in my entire life. I don’t know if it is millions of tiny sonic booms compounded together, but it sounds like a rocket powered zipper ripping the sky apart down to its basic particles. It’s incredibly loud, and you feel it in your chest. And it’s entirely odd, since nothing sounds quite like it.

It was almost overwhelming to watch tons of equipment rise off the ground and shoot up to the air until it disappeared completely. It’s a triumph of science, an 11th flight that built on the previous 10, along with every previous flight of the past 60 years that NASA has existed. It was also a triumph of mathematics and astronomy and engineering and loads of other disciplines.

Rockets are a concerted, collected effort. Dozens of different agencies work together with hundreds of private companies and suppliers. Space programs from half a dozen different countries worked together to assemble the thousands of parts that formed it. And still, it all worked.

As the rocket left the ground I couldn’t help but feel I was witnessing a pinnacle of human achievement and knowledge, not only raising a seemingly impossible amount of mass off the ground but up into the sky where it was set to converge with a bunch of people floating in a box that itself orbits the Earth every 90 minutes. Imagine the math required to get that right.

We sent a rocket up with food, supplies, and experiments and it will be in astronaut hands in a day and a half. That’s fucking incredible.

Watching the launch made today one of the top 5 days of my life.