For the past three months, I have been working with the team in Copenhagen from Barcelona.
There is no business reason for this, it is purely for the experience. Now, there are some obvious disadvantages to working away from the rest of the team. Office smalltalk, while not necessarily directly related to the project at hand, really keeps you in the loop in a way that is hard to obtain over a distance. On the other hand, constraints foster creativity. A real problem is rare and hard to find - and extremely valuable. So if I can help produce problems by working from Spain, I will be quite happy

So far, my random observations are:

1) Skype is amazing. Video conferencing is at a point where it just works. There are glitches and every now and then, the connection will die but overall, having a meeting with the Copenhagen team feels to me like I am present. Having a decent web camera really helps in this matter as having a high quality picture makes a very noticable difference. I bought a couple of Logitech Pro 9000 cams which deliver a very nice quality and frame rate.

2) Timezones matter. We run a very agile process with stand-up meetings every morning (okay, I don't actually stand up but that's because I am in front of the camera) at 9. This is always a good thing but it becomes even more important if you are located elsewhere, just to get in synch every day. However, such meetings are much easier when you are in the same timezone. And while Barcelona and Copenhagen are that, they are in different cultural timezones in the sense that the Spanish have very different eating habits than the Danes. I'm still working on adjusting my daily routine to fit both as well as I can.

3) A good thing about working remotely is that you can actually force peace and quiet if you need to. If I turn off my instant messaging, people can only bother me by calling me which they only will if it is very important. This is much harder to achieve if you are in the same office. We usually solve this by running synchronized Pomodoro's though. I will get back to Pomodoros and working remotely in a later post.

4) If you are already using version control and Google Docs or similar for your code and management, going remote is dead-simple! I was quite astonished to find that I could literally sit down in my Barcelona office and be doing normal work within 10 minutes. Everything works just as it does when I am in Copenhagen. I guess this shouldn't surprise me but still, it was a pleasant experience.

By Kristian Dupont