By the fact that we do have an fn key on our keyboards at all, you've probably guessed that most of us work on a laptop, or using a keyboard which mirrors the one on the laptop (such as Apple's keyboard which is the same as on the MacBook Pro). I'm among them, so clearly I agree that it's the best choice.
Out of the 32 people who participated in the survey, 12 use fn+ctrl (37.5%). So, which keyboard shortcut to use? I've been asked about this independently a couple of times recently: what is the most popular shortcut at SoftwareMill? Not knowing the answer, I conducted a short survey. It's kind of an always-online call, muted by default, unmuted with a keyboard shortcut. Everybody (who's not muted) can hear you and respond. If you're not familiar with the concept, in TeamSpeak you join a room, and when you want to say something to your team members (well, other people in the same room), you activate voice transmission with a special keyboard shortcut.
For more details on how we use Teamspeak, see Tomek's blog.Ī crucial component in a push-to-talk (PTT) system is the way you activate it. You might have last used it when playing your favorite PlayStation game, but it turns out it's also very useful for remote work. Part of our solution is to use a push-to-talk system, TeamSpeak in our case. Being a distributed company and working remotely creates new challenges when it comes to efficient communication.
