Week 930

Matt Kirkland

It's Week 930! I (Matt) am starting a month of working remote from Munich, Germany.

This is a thing we actively encourage at Brand New Box. BNB is a machine that creates great superpower software for our clients, that let them do incredible things. But we've also built this machine to throw off, as a byproduct, a large amount of indpendence for our staff. And we want everybody to use that indepence to do fun stuff like travel.

It's not uncommon, of course, for tech companies to be able to work remotely. And the BNB team is all remote in the post-pandemic world, having not kept physical office space since 2020. But working from your desk at home is one thing, and working from a REMOTE remote location is diffent. But still, we try to arrange our work so that we can be both asynchronous and remote.

I'm not innovator here, either. A bunch of us at BNB have done something similar. Ashley went to Switzerland for a month, Will went to England for a month, and we are often surprized what city Vika is joining the Discord call from.

Remote is easy, async is a little harder - we aim for a shared check-in meeting once/day (it's called... The Status). So wherever you are calling home for the workday, we try to get everybody on one live call together.

And we're often working in teams and pairs together, so it's nice to have some overlap in working hours. But the EU is pretty good for this - we've got a fine set of overlapping hours between CST and CEST.

Each time though, it's a bit of learning experience - how to keep the same level of involvement while your feet are on new soil, and also balance that with taking advantage of the travel you're doing. Either way, it's part of BNB's ethos - we do interesting things besides code!