We are WordPress developers. Normally our whole team work in one office, enjoying the time together. For the past ten years, we have seen that having a real office is great for developers, and we hear that from our dev-team that they learn a lot just by sitting next to a colleague who has a different experience, different problems and different ways of thinking. It is priceless.
On the other hand, it was always my idea to build our workflow and set up the whole company to easily switch to fully remote work. Why? In case of fire taking down our whole office building? Or important employee deciding to move to the other side of the country or planet? I didn’t think about coronavirus or any other virus for sure.
Does it work?
Yes, because we were ready. Everybody disconnected their laptops from external monitors, packed them to their backpacks and started working from home the day after.
Luckily we decided to shut down the office a full week before the virus spread across the country.
How do our developers work from home?
Pretty much the same way they do it in the office. We always try to keep things simple. We use popular apps and cloud servcies:
- Slack for instant communication. Everyone say “Hello” on the morning. We have daily standup “meeting” for all developers. We have separate channels for production work, and for administration, and for fun… Communication is our oxygen.
- Basecamp for project management, collaborating with clients and communicating everything that is important and should last longer than quick Slack messages.
- Google Drive is a place where we keep our files and share them across the team. Nothing should be kept on a single computer hard drive.
- Online code repositories like Github or Bitbucket.
- E-mail is not allowed. Simply.
- Phone calls are not allowed. Well, it’s allowed if really necessary but a detailed note is obligatory to keep all the details written down.
And that’s it. Nothing fancy but it works like a charm. Just the right tools in the right hands.
Stay safe and productive!