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The coronavirus pandemic is shaping a new world. A recent HR survey from Gartner claims that 88% of surveyed companies have encouraged or required their employees to work from home. We were no exception, and this crisis impacted us at Moka as well.

Transitioning into an entirely virtual work environment has been challenging, but we adapted very quickly. What really hit us was THE MEETINGS.

We are a close-knit team, and we were very used to working together in an open space office that fostered lots of verbal communication. Brainstorming, syncing, and planning projects was quite easy in this environment. When moving into remote, we felt we needed to keep the same amount of verbal communication we used to have in the office, leading to having more meetings. A few of 15 min syncs here, a couple of 1 hour all-hands sessions there, and we were suddenly using a significant portion of our days in videoconferences. …

Back in the day, computers worked with electron beams, and the light coming from them was really dim. The arrival of CRT monitors that could emit brighter lights and more colors and the advent of GUIs (Graphic User Interphase) introduced light mode, which is what we use today.

So what led us to go vintage? And why did we embraced light mode, to begin with?

Light vs. Dark

Light mode is the most natural way to read or use a device. We, humans, have historically been diurnal creatures. 200,000 years ago, we hunted, gathered, and planted by daytime. …

“If you believe that the world is conspiring against you, it will just do that.”

─ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Assuming the worst of people is easy. This super competitive world has raised us to be self-sufficient and consider everyone a rival─or worse, an enemy.

These assumptions tend to translate to professional relations quite easily. You may feel attacked if your manager is trying to find out why your part of the job went wrong, or if you are trying to understand the intent of an email. It is totally natural to feel that way.

But if there is something that we have come to learn at Moka is that great teams work with good intentions in mind. …

I arrived in Argentina on February 10th of this year (2020). After living my entire life in Venezuela I made the choice to come to the country and study. This is a story of what has happened after my arrival, the things I’ve experienced, and the shocks I’ve had along the way.

Farewells in Venezuela are not uncommon. The socio-economic crisis created an exodus almost as massive as the one in Syria. So saying goodbye to my friends and family, although it was difficult, I had prepared for that. …

Both Redis and Memcached are in-memory data storage systems. Redis is an open-source key-value store, and Memcached is a high-performance distributed cache service. They are in charge of making in-memory copies of accessed data in a certain period.

In our case, we configure WordPress to cache pages, database queries, objects, and to minify and cache some assets such as JS and CSS files, and, of course, the HTML of the response itself.

Redis

Let’s start with Redis. According to their site:

Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Supported data structures

• strings,
• hashes,
• lists…

Do you have “that thing” that’s always hard to remember, but you know it’s important? Birthdays, chores, activities, something’s missing. The same thing tends to happen in projects.

Having a checklist that reminds you of those tasks is a useful yet straightforward aid to fulfill requirements. We think that complicated issues don’t need to be answered by intricate solutions.

It’s flexible, and you can adapt it to any project with a defined structure. We use it to keep those easy-to-forget tasks in check.

In this post, you’ll learn how to generate checklist items and how you can promote it in your company. …

This article should serve as a starting point into what Vision in Product Design is.

ViP is a design process developed by Paul Hekkert and Matthijs van Dijk. It’s a framework oriented to explore opportunities for a product in the future.

You won’t become an oracle or a card reader (that’d be cool, though!). However, with this exercise, you will gain enough insight into a product’s origin to design its future.

To say a bit about ViP:

• It has a context-driven approach. This enables external factors to impact design decisions.
• It centers on human interaction. Focus on the emotion to understand how a user feels with the product.
• It asks the question: why does this exist? And it defines it. Also, it draws a map to figure how its current iteration came to be. …

You can hear the phrase “there’s an opportunity in every crisis” from time to time. Some even use the word “oportuncrisis,” but if we look beyond these phrases, we see that they’re hollow. No one takes the time to figure out how to give value to chaos.

Every business doesn’t need to have a backup plan to face these types of situations where demand decreases, and operations begin to diminish; there’s always something that everyone in the team can do to help the company. Introspecting and finding our value is how we start being part of the solution.

Suppose we consider that our problem-solving skills come from the way we look at issues. In that case, we must find a way to analyze these situations from a more pragmatic point of view. Being nervous or anxious clouds our judgment and avoids finding a solution. …