Category: Personal
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Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ years
Continue Reading: Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ yearsWith so many people now having to learn to work remotely due to restrictions related to COVID-19, what information can people share who have been working from home? Back in October 2019, I realized it was 20 years ago when I started working remotely, and so I sent out some tweets asking for opinions about the benefits of working remotely, the challenges / disadvantages, and then the lessons people have learned. I subsequently recorded podcast episodes on each of those three topics.
The links to the Twitter threads and podcasts are below.At some point I may turn them into longer articles themselves, but in the meantime, I hope they will help some of you with ideas for how to get adjusted to this new way of working.
And… I would suspect many of you might just want to jump directly to the lessons learned…
Benefits
- Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1181883371611406336
- Podcast episode: TDYR 380 – Remote Working, Part 1: What are the BENEFITS of working from home?
Many of the benefits were about no commute, the ability to be present with family, freedom to work and live wherever, flexibility, caring for family, and more. (Note that a good number of the benefits mentioned (such as working…
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Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging at Disruptive Telephony
Continue Reading: Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging at Disruptive TelephonyTen years ago today, on December 18, 2006, I launched this blog with a very short 1-paragraph post:
Welcome to Disruptive Telephony! For a number of years, I have been blogging about VoIP as part of my personal blog, “Blog.DanYork.com”. However, I’m now in the process of splitting out some parts of my writing into separate blogs. This is one of those blogs. Right now… I’m just setting it up, so don’t expect to see much here. Stay tuned, though… much will be happening soon.
At the time, I was living in Burlington, Vermont, and working remotely for the Office of the CTO at Mitel Networks back up in Ottawa, Ontario (where we lived from 2000-2005). Dave Edwards, a friend from Ottawa, left the only comment on that post.
In 2006, the “VoIP blogging” world was quite small – and we all pretty much knew other. Om Malik was writing on his own site (it was yet to become GigaOm). Andy Abramson had VoIPWatch. Jeff Pulver was writing on his sites. Tom Keating at his “VoIP and Gadgets blog” on TMC. Martin Geddes had his “Telepocalypse” site. Alec Saunders had “Saunderslog”. And there were a few others…
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Four Years At The Internet Society
Continue Reading: Four Years At The Internet SocietyIt was four years ago today that I joined the Internet Society staff… and what an amazing four years it has been!If I go back and read my long post here about joining ISOC in September 2011, my passion and motivation continues to be the same – if anything, that passion has only gotten stronger!
As I wrote about last year in my three-year post, the “Internet of opportunity” that we all value is under severe threat.
The big change for me this past year, was, of course, the big change of joining the Internet Society Strategic Communications team in March 2015 (you can also listen to an audio recording).
That’s been a wonderful yet crazy change!
If you go back and look at what I wrote last year – or two years ago – it’s all about the technology behind the Internet and how we need to improve the infrastructure to make the Internet work better, be faster and be more secure.
The change this year is that now I’m more involved in other areas of Internet Society work, particularly in the public policy space. You can see that in some of the posts I’ve been writing for…
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Ch-changes – Taking A New Job At The Internet Society To Join The Fight For The Open Internet
Continue Reading: Ch-changes – Taking A New Job At The Internet Society To Join The Fight For The Open InternetIn the end, my impending job change is perhaps best explained by two quotes: this prescient quote from the 1992 film Sneakers:
“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
and this quote from poet Mary Oliver:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
For a longer explanation, read on… but perhaps not on a mobile phone… this one’s a bit on the lengthy side…
Bleeding “Voxeo Blue”
Just shy of four years ago, I wrote here about joining this incredibly remarkable company, Voxeo, that probably none of you had ever heard of.
I hope I changed that a wee bit. 🙂
Around a thousand blog posts later, a hundred videos, too many speaking engagements and webinars to count, many articles, a ton of analyst briefings and media interviews … and countless tweets, Facebook posts and other updates later… it has been truly an amazing journey.
Along the way I have come to truly love the company -…
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Two years with Voxeo…
Continue Reading: Two years with Voxeo…It truly amazes me to realize that it’s been over two years since I wrote that I was joining Voxeo. It’s rather symptomatic of how well it is going with Voxeo that although I tweeted about this anniversary when it happened 4 weeks ago, I’ve just been way too busy to actually write anything about it here.I had all these grand delusions, too, about how I was going to write about all the lessons I’ve learned… about some of the great things I’ve done… the people I’ve met… etc., etc.
But the reality is that I’ve simply learned way too much, done too many great things and met too many great people to easily write such a post.
So here’s the short summary of what I’ve learned over two years:
Voxeo rocks!
It’s a great place to work with tremendous benefits (and we’re hiring)… there’s a fantastic team of people involved… it’s fun to be with a company on the bleeding edge of how communication is changing… that is this big massive SIP-based application cloud… that does disruptive things like give away speech recognition technology (and other products) for free… is focusing on innovation in communication and offering new…
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Of eComm and boots…
Continue Reading: Of eComm and boots…Out an eComm last week, Jon Arnold posted a set of pictures that included this fun one of me (click for larger version):For those not aware… I’ve been wearing “western boots”/”cowboy boots” for years… in fact, I wrote up a fun story a while back about how Twitter and Facebook helped me find cowboy boots in Ottawa.
(And boots purists will note, of course, that the pair pictured here at eComm are not really real western boots in that they don’t have a leather sole. These are in fact my winter western boots that have a rubber sole with a tread. Smooth leather soles don’t work too well in New Hampshire winters with ice and snow 😉 And while eComm was in San Francisco, I did have icy parking lots in NH to be thinking about. I’ll be able to start wearing the other ones real soon now… )
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Six months with Voxeo…
Continue Reading: Six months with Voxeo…I find it rather astounding to me that it was six months ago today that I announced that I had joined Voxeo. Where did the time go?It’s been a really amazing six months that has so greatly expanded my knowledge into new areas I hadn’t played with before. This picture from our “VoIP Platform Overview” page perhaps best shows what I find so interesting about Voxeo’s platform:
On the one hand, it’s an XML-driven SIP application server… yet it’s also a media server… and then there’s all the speech stuff – Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech, etc…. VoiceXML, CCXML, CallXML… and then it’s a conferencing server… all based on SIP and using things like ENUM and so much more.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects for me is that on one level we are customer-focused working with individual developers to help them learn to build voice applications. But then on the back-end we have this massively-scalable, redundant hosting infrastructure and we are among the largest consumers of SIP trunks in North America. (And constantly in need of more – a colleague of mine is tasked nearly full-time with working with carriers to find more SIP trunk…
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My new employer is……….
Continue Reading: My new employer is……….So here’s the story… after my layoff from Mitel and the corresponding job hunt, I became very convinced that I should go down the consultant/analyst route. I had purchased equipment, started setting up the legal side of things and was in serious discussions with several others about allying (and aligning) myself with their own efforts. All looked good and I was excited to get going.
Then I got this email from a CEO of a company I’d never really heard of who said he’d found my blog posts and that it so happened that they were looking for someone doing essentially the roles that I outlined in one of my posts. As they were growing strongly they were looking to expand their “Office of the CTO” and add to their capabilities. I looked at their website and initially wasn’t too sure about what I saw. But as I dug in a bit more I was pretty blown away by what I started to see… and got back in touch.
It turns out that there’s this company based in Orlando, Florida, whose VoIP application platform is used by one of the world’s largest telecom vendors, two of the worlds largest software…
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So I should stop teasing about my new job, eh?
Continue Reading: So I should stop teasing about my new job, eh?So I should stop teasing about what I’m doing and just blog about it, eh? I will… today. I had every intention of doing so last night but what appeared to be the onset of a severe migraine headache sent me back to my hotel room early to try and escape it. Thankfully, the migraine never materialized and the symptoms gradually went away… but in the meantime I was out of writing commission and my post is only half done.
I do have to admit that it is tempting to continue teasing when a friend says she is thinking of calling every VoIP company in Florida (I’ve given that info away via Twitter) asking receptionists if she can speak to “Dan York”… that would be mildly entertaining, especially if there was another Dan York out there at another company.
However, I have a whole queue of articles I want to write and I need to get this major one out first, so I will.
Soon. Today.
