Thankfully I’ve never had a long distance romantic relationship. I imagine Zoom isn’t really up to the task of replacing snuggles. A hug emoji isn’t a hug. This had led me to believe that any kind of long distance relationship was inferior to a short distance one. I was wrong.

How could I bond with my colleagues to any meaningful degree if I couldn’t fist bump them after they deployed a new feature and say “ayyy that was lit fam”?

When I was about sixteen I met a group of Irish/British chaps on Xbox Live. We were on equal footing in regards to skill level and wisecracks. Naturally, we exchanged friend requests. I was easily the youngest of the group, by about a decade or so. For over two years, multiple nights a week, I played games online with this group. I remember feeling like I was living a double life of sorts. I had this lame AFK life; where I stacked shelves in a convenience store, slogged through school, and drove a bright yellow Ford KA. And then, I had this online life. Where my AFK life faded into the void. No real life problems in here, pal. All that mattered here was killing the other team and stealing their flag. SpunkeyMunkey - my virtual friend by my virtual side, uncharacteristically still alive, characteristically shouting obscenities.

Time passed and at some point, I noticed this duality of life had fizzled out. Slowly but suddenly it no longer was. I hadn’t kept in contact with anyone from the Xbox Live group. Life got in the way, right. People come together, people fall apart. And I forgot an important lesson - you don’t ever need to physically meet someone for them to become the best part of your life.

Before joining CircleCI I mistakenly believed I’d have weaker ties to my virtual teammates than those prior in central London offices. My Xbox Live memories now well behind me, I’d had only lacklustre engagement chatting to people behind a mic. Companies were forced to be remote first due to the Covid-19, but they didn’t know how to be. Having semi-regular 1-2-1s with each member of a team (and occasionally those outside of it) is an underrated idea. When I first joined I practically brushed it off. 1-1 chats with my teammates you say? Well, that’s purely another unchecked checkbox on my onboarding checklist.

In practice, speaking with only one other person for twenty minutes or so via video call is a pretty goddamn good way to start building rapport. It’s got a certain enjoyable intensity to it that “grabbing a coffee” with an office colleague doesn’t have. Combine this with a dash of paired-programming and a thicc tablespoon of paired-learning gives you a rather delicious teammate cake.

Although, we can’t quite have our cake and eat it too. This is great for the people who are pairing - but the other team members who are not present miss out. And when you’re on a team choc full of fresh faced cadets just beginning their CircleCI journey - like my team, this ain’t great. Sure, you could open up the session to your entire team but then the atmosphere is vastly different. The intimacy is gone. The pressure to make sure you’re using everyones time effectively is there. You’d need to be comfortable with making mistakes in-front of your whole team, or worse yet - playing it safe and not going out of your comfort zone.

Luckily the bad boy of Tipperary was on hand to offer some sage wisdom. Cian Synnott gently stroked his beard and proposed “Why not record a casual, short - maximum five minute summary of any useful takeaways from the 1-1 session, and just stick it in Slack”. If people like it, make more. If they don’t, then don’t. And as fate would have it, Slack notified me today of Slack Clips which may be perfectly suited to this purpose.

But yeah, I was wrong about the long distance thing.

Long distance aside; I can definitively say, in my limited experience, that developing feelings for a fictional character could never compare is absolute balderdash. Sorta.

Music