The virtual office

One of the interesting upcoming challenges at SynthaSite is the migration of parts of the company to San Francisco, while leaving what is currently the bulk of (and, interestingly, the newest additions to) the company behind.

But most of those challenges are around "soft" issues like effective communication and retention of culture, and while I hope to be able to figure out important lessons around that in future, now I mostly want to express my surprise at how little the technology - hardware, software, and network - stands in the way of this move.

When the move was first discussed (admittedly only days after I arrived), I was told I'd probably need to go over to San Francisco for a few weeks to help the rest of the team set up.  And, well, that sounded about right.  As a company that develops software as one of its main functions, and as a company that needs accurate business information for business development, "customers" (ie, people who sign up for free to create their own web sites), and "sales leads" (ie, people who we want to sign up for free to create their own web sites), and as a company that has particular needs in terms of informing and satisfying investors, we need a lot of tools.

Tools for project management, issue management, support, team collaboration, revision control, building, testing, deploying, scheduling, mail, company information and documentation, and plain old file sharing.  And that's just the stuff I use on a daily basis.  Business also has and needs tools.

However, it seems that that estimate of a few weeks was way off.  Being able to work effectively from an office in San Francisco and being able to work effectively from your home in Cape Town and being able to work effectively from wherever you find yourself aren't particularly different. 

Because we've had people who've had to travel a lot, and because we have people who would rather work from home and actually see their kids (whether human or canine) every once in a while, we're almost entirely ready for this change - almost all of our tools are already not in our Cape Town office.

So, while I might like a chance to see the new offices and catch a conference (The Python community conference, PyCon, is in Chicago roughly around the time we'll be setting up offices, after all), there's not much I need beyond a IP-over-KVM system and one (or, at a stretch, two) servers for things that need to be in the office (like a file and backup server), and I can do the whole thing from Cape Town.

This situation is just a fortuitous coincidence - the attitude towards tools at SynthaSite has always seemed refreshing and enlightened.  If it's needed, get it.  If it can be externally managed, do that.  I get the sense that the few tools that aren't externally managed are being eyed carefully every once in a while for potential replacement or a move to a managed solution (much like what we did with our support system).

(Of course, to those from outside South Africa, this may come across as absurd or just obvious.  Having been stuck with poor connectivity in the past, it's never seemed reasonable to rely on external, especially international, services.  And still being stuck with pretty poor connectivity, we can't reasonably host tools in South Africa for our international team mates.)