dsaffy

This is a good point. If the manager is going to implement Pragli, they need to make it very clear that opting out is very OK and even encouraged... we need to do a better job of making this feel socially OK in the app.

Genuinely curious: do people actually use these at Atlassian? In college we had a portal to another college that looked very similar, and it was never used.

This is a really thoughtful response! FWIW, we believe the future involves both sync and async tools. Friday seems like it could be helpful on the async side.

Thanks! :)

Oh yeah that would be awesome... I definitely think that's the future

We actually have a feature in Pragli that sort of does this... https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/

Quick note from the author: Pragli has a feature that is inspired by a walkie-talkie. Pragli itself is not just an online walkie-talkie. Check out our homepage if you want to learn more about Pragli (pragli.com)

If you haven't already, take a look at the section "Solving Distraction: Presence + Statuses + Calendar" in the article - I dive into our attempt to solve this problem.

Do you think our solution is insufficient? If so, any ideas on how we could further solve it?

Take a look at the section "Solving Distraction: Presence + Statuses + Calendar" in the article - I dive into our attempt to solve this problem.

Thanks for sharing your experience Tom! I DM'd you on Twitter, would love to learn more.

Making it very customizable is key. Different teams have different workflows.

We hope that statuses / our calendar integration provide the outlet for remote workers to have focus time. It's definitely a balance!

FWIW it's worked well for us, but our application has the follow characteristics: 1) Our data is relatively small and well-scoped, so we're only querying small amounts of data (maybe 10-20 queries each of <50 records) from any individual client 2) We care a lot about real-time, so we want data manipulation on one client to show up pretty immediately on the other 3) While we'd definitely save money switching to a Postgres instance, we're not spending that much to begin with on Firebase.

I think these play well to Firebase's strength. In a previous life I built an app that sucks in a lot of data exhaust and then visualizes it... IMO Firebase wouldn't have worked well for that.

You are correct - Firebase can order server-side. I also believe I could integrate it without sacrificing elegance. At some point I'll put out a new version that takes advantage of this.

Yup... fixed!

Yes! I’ve replaced so many HOCs... hooks are so much cleaner.

We don't use hooks for doing writes / updates... I'm curious if there's a clever way to do that. Maybe the useDbData hook could also return a write callback?

I haven't - but that's a good idea! Might have to do another post...

It's a bit inconvenient sometimes, but it can be done well. https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/structure-data

Maybe I should just make the mapping customizable, so that if one wants the "neutral" emotion to translate to "serious", they can do that.

Thanks! Appreciate you giving it a look.

Thanks! Right now, it's just a hover that shows what they're playing. But would be cool to sync you up with them on click.

That's a cool idea!

The facial recognition just detects position and emotion, not other visual information (eg hair style). You plug that in yourself in an avatar editor. Could be interesting to play with!

Yeah... I mostly just went off feel. Since most of the time people working are "neutral", and the "neutral" looks pretty serious / not super happy, it just made a bad vibe for the team for everyone to be looking mopey. So I switched it to be a bit happier.

The half-empty view is that it's "fake happiness" but the half-full view is that it better conveys your intent to your team, that you are (hopefully) happy to be hanging out and getting work done with them. A wall of smiles also makes people feel more welcome and included than a wall of meh.

Still room to play with this though.

Thanks! I'm working on making it more real-time... would love to satisfy that use case even better.

I've actually had a couple people say that they used it that way - only on calls, and then switch back to keyboard/mouse detection after call is over.

They are a lot of the time in practice. For us, the movement with a little facial recognition change is just a piece of the puzzle. We also added (optional) integrations like Spotify and Slack and are working on more to give other signals.

Overall goal is to help with loneliness of remote work and make people feel more comfortable just starting audio / video conversations with one another.

Thanks!!!

Thanks!!!