2026-07-17 –, Thomas Swain Room
Building software is often presented as the ultimate in asynchronous collaboration - open a PR, wait for a review, work on something else, and come back when it's a good time for you. The reality can often be... messier.
As someone who lives in UTC+8, works in UTC+10, and collaborates globally, I'll share my experience of why 7AM meetings aren't all bad, how to deal with the itch to respond to reviews on a Saturday morning, and how I finally learnt to listen to my wife and learn to switch off when there was no good reason to be on.
I'm notionally a senior developer, but I only finished my PhD four years ago. What this means in practice for me is that I feel a lot of pressure to understand tools & libraries I've only just come across, figure out issues nobody else has (or can), and constantly dig deeper whilst maintaining a productive output.
The added complication? I work remotely, a 38 hour drive from an office 2 timezones ahead of me. have a shed at the bottom of the garden where I work. This might seem great as a WFH work-life separator, but I have a gym in there too, so it's also where I exercise and tinker with things.
In this talk, I'll outline:
- Why there's nothing wrong with a 7AM meeting - so long as you're willing (and able!) to shut the computer off early too.
- Why I don't bring my laptop into the house.
- Why it's harder - not easier - to stop working when the office hours no longer line up.
- How a nap in the hammock or a walk with the dog can be the right move for productivity
- Why you shouldn't have Github, Slack, or Zulip on your phone - and why I do anyway.
- How to forgive yourself for ignoring your own rules and opening a PR at 10PM on a Thursday night - and why you shouldn't berate yourself for it!
This is not going to be a technical talk, but one about how to make peace with your compulsion to be useful, how to listen to your wife and switch off when you shouldn't be working, and how the dynamics of open source, time zones, and how the messy nature international collaboration makes it harder to say no to yet another project you don't have time for.
Charles is a Research Software Engineer at ACCESS-NRI, where he works in the Model Evaluation and Diagnostics team, helping make it easier to access and analyse climate data. He has a PhD in Oceanography, where he first discovered his love of wrangling and disseminating data.
When not in front of a computer, he enjoys routinely injuring himself in a variety of sports.