Going remote: One year with DNSimple

Dec 27, 2017

Going remote

As mentioned in my previous post, I am working remotely for about a year now. I wanted to work remotely for quite some time before that. Getting a remote job is quite hard, as most companies want you to have existing remote work experience already. So getting into it is tricky. I managed to join DNSimple after a period of a short-term contract.

When I announced that I’m joining DNSimple my friend Daan challenge me to blog about my experience.

So here am I summarizing my first year of working with DNSimple. Whenever I mention that I am working remotely, I usually face the same questions. Here are the Top 3 and their respective answers.

FAQ

Where is your company based?

We have no headquarter, the company DNSimple is a US company. But the team is globally distributed across six different countries.

So you are working from home?

TL;DR: Sometimes.

It depends some month I prefer staying at home, but I quickly realize I’m not that productive and staying at home the entire day drains my mood. I also work from various co-working spaces, some month I spend a more or less regular working day there. Others I’m only there to attend a conference call.

But my most favorite places are coffee shops, I wrote an article about the dos and don’ts of working from coffee shops. Coffeeshops are great because you have people around you it’s a busy environment but allows focus (for me).

Are you lonely?

No! I’m part of a team, we work together, we are just not in an office. We’ve Slack that’s our company water cooler, where you meet your coworkers, joke around and chit-chat. Say hello when you arrive and let others know when it’s time to pick up the little one from the Kindergarten.

We also see each other at least three times a year at a tremendous sunny place somewhere on earth when we have our team meetups. This year, we’ve been to the south of France, Rome and the USA.

If I feel to urge to have actual human conversations, it’s OK to take the time to just meet a friend for an extended Lunch. That’s part of working remotely too.

Frustrations

When I started I remember one of the biggest frustrations was to keep up with everything that was happening. Slack is a firehose. Every commit, every PR, every signup and every human is posting to the chat. A LOT. I wanted to read and understand everything. There is so much going on, and I had questions about every single bit.

In hindsight, this is great. It creates the feeling that you are not working alone, and even if no one is actively chatting, you see that others are around because they trigger the web hooks that fire into chat. Now, this firehose creates a warm and fuzzy feeling for me.

Celebrations

There is so much to celebrate it’s hard to pick the most and single best thing. For me, it is the fact to work with brilliant humans, that are eager to teach. I can learn so many great new things in a field I am very interested in. Still, there are many things to learn and areas to improve technically and especially personally.

I am thankful for being presented with the opportunity and working with so many great and wonderful humans. Thank you wonderful humans of DNSimple onwards to the next years!