Jumping Home

Around the end of 2009, I found I had been working for the same company for almost 5 years. It was the company that allowed me to leave Manila and set off on my own in a different city. It was a stable company based in the US but with developers here in the Philippines, and the people were great friends and colleagues. I had grown a lot while I was there, and I owed a lot to that company. However, I had pretty much hit a wall and I felt I needed to get out if I wanted to move on with my career. I was at a point when I was pretty much uninspired at work and starting to loathe going to the office.

Enter 2010, and I received a call from a friend. They had an opening for a developer in their company and he wanted to know if I was interested.

Some background on my friend. He's one of the best programmers I know. Pretty much a genius. I'd been aware of his work set-up for some time and I had actually joked to him numerous times that he should bring me in whenever he got the chance.

So anyway, my friend offering this job, was literally an answer to my prayers. He didn't even have to give me details about the job. I was pretty much set to say yes as soon as he asked. So as soon as we worked out the details and I got a better idea of what I'd need to do, I updated my CV and sent it out to him.

Soon enough, I was contacted by the company's ops head and interviewed over the phone. Everything went smoothly and I was asked to fly to Manila just for a face to face interview and to get the contract. Things got slightly delayed at this point since my friend got busy, but eventually, the date was set and I flew to Manila to finalize everything and sign the contract.

And so, 5 years to the day after I started with my old company, I handed in my resignation. A month after that, I started working from home full time. And that's where I am now.

How does working from home compare to being in an office? For me, after a few adjustments early on, I've found that I'm actually a lot more productive in this environment. Being in my industry, it does become difficult at times to separate work time and home time. But it's been fun so far and I honestly can't remember how I managed to make a 9-5 office job work before.

Home office essentials

I am inspired by B's post on what he uses for his home office. I'll continue this line of thought.

Computer

This can be a laptop, desktop, a PC or a Mac. It doesn't matter. You'll need something that allows you to open Word, Excel, Visio and several chat dialogs at the same time. If you're a graphic artist you'll need some memory if you plan to work on big image files.

I like having a 2 hard drive setup with an external hard drive. My applications are usually installed on the first drive and I save documents on the second drive. I also periodically back-up my documents with my external hard drive.

Software

As a project manager, Visio is indispensable to me. I find that the open source alternative Dia is not my cup of tea. I was also used to using Microsoft Office but you can use OpenOffice as a free alternative or go totally cloud based with Google Docs. I also use OpenProject since MS Project is quite expensive.

I have Skype and Yahoo Messenger installed as my instant messaging applications. Skype becomes very important for my daily scrums with my team as we all do a conference call.

For file sharing across teams I share my Dropbox folder. This way we don't have to send files back and forth via e-mail. You can install Dropbox and it will sync your files automatically in the background or just access from the site.

Other equipment

In my case I need a headset with a mic. Yes, I look like a call center agent but this allows me to have my conference calls in private. I also have an IPad which I initially bought just for myself but find that I am testing our IPad optimized sites on it. I also have a Blackberry phone which my client sent over for testing the Blackberry application we're working on as well as an Android phone.

I have a Flip HD video camera which I used to video the behavior of this app I was testing. This is a bit extreme since you can use your own phone's video function to do the same thing.

Online tools

In some projects we do use Basecamp and another one that I'm currently road-testing is Pivotal Tracker for agile software development.

Internet access

This is the most important one for me. I find that I need a reliable connection so a DSL line is my only option. I use SkyBroadband right now but I did encounter some difficulties last week. I hope that they really fixed their plant trouble.

So there! Most of these tools can be downloaded from the internet or are items that you would normally have in your home. I think one of my next posts will be how to organize your work from home position or in other words: How does your client really know you are working from home?

Cooking @ Localhost

1 afternoon (one or two hours is enough, add more to taste)
1 two-year old
1 dad/mom or both
1 ball

Put work aside. Take the afternoon. Mix with the ball.
Toss the ball to the two year old. Have mom/dad participate.

Makes a LOT of servings of fun and laughter.

How I got started working from home

To give you a brief background story, I am a project manager who was recently retrenched from a company. I'm not your typical freelancer and in fact was actively looking for a regular job. However over the Christmas season a former officemate asked me if I wanted to try some part-time work. I would usually not be open such inquiries but I did need the money so I said yes. A lot of people had already approached me for freelance work and I thought this might not pan out as well.

I was introduced to his friend who is based in the US and she functions like a client officer. She coordinates with her clients in the US and needs people to do the work here in the Philippines. She was looking for a project manager and due to my friend's recommendation wanted to "interview" me via Skype.

The interview went well enough and though our initial project was quite annoying due to the many unanticipated bugs that plagued it; she liked my working style enough to offer me more work.

I had reached a crossroads then, another company was lining me up for interviews while my client wanted me to do more projects with her. I weighed the pros and cons of each.

I thought of myself as a corporate animal since I worked well with both business and technical people. However the thought the commute and being away from my son most of his waking hours were not that appealing. Yet a corporate job would give me support in the sense that I would have medical benefits and probably bonuses as well.

Starting off in this freelance journey of mine meant working primarily at home. However my work is entirely dependent on how many projects I get. I work with people that I have not even met! Everything is done online like sharing documentation, getting feedback and monitoring progress. It is twice as challenging. Yet, I see my son and am able to also do many household errands that would normally would be allocated for the weekends if I had a corporate job.

I consulted my family. Some people didn't really understand it but my Dad and husband thought that freelancing was great. They also liked the fact that I can keep a close eye on my son all the time.

Thus, I made the decision to follow through on this freelance journey of mine. At times it can be very challenging since I need to adapt to the timezone of my client and coordinate with people I never see. However I find that doing this allows me to balance my need to be challenged as a productive member of society yet still be there for my son. I may just have started on this but I hope to continue it for as long as I can.

Tools @ Home

Now I know I promised more of an introduction for this post. Insipration took me down a different route however. :)

One of the things I need to keep in mind since I work from home, is that I have to be a little more organized with my planning and scheduling that I would normally be if I were in an office environment. One consideration is that in an office, I'd pretty much have an unlimited supply of post-it notes, pencils, notebooks, and other stuff* that would make my daily organization tasks much easier.

*yes, even if I am in IT, I am still old school when it comes to my organizational skills. Pen and paper are never too far away when I work.

Working from home kinda limits my resources in the office supply department. Another challenge that faced me was that I'd have to coordinate and work with people that I'd only be meeting in an online setting most of the time. So to face these challenges, I've come to rely on the following set of tools to help me through my day-to-day activities.

Chat Clients

Most basic, but also, one of my most important tools. I mostly use Yahoo Messenger and Skype to chat and touch base with my colleagues at work.

Time Management

1DayLater - Early on in my career as a work from home person (from here on in called a localhoster^tm), I still had to finish off some work from my previous employer. Since I was no longer a regular employee, I had to bill them for the time I spent on their projects. That's when I discovered 1DayLater. It's evolved a bit since I first started using it, but the basic tools are there. A timer that lets you be as accurate as you need to be, mapping and graphs to give you a visual idea how much time you're actually spending on a project, and, though you have to pay for it, tools for billing.

The free version is more than enough for my needs.

Document Management

Google Docs and Open Office - One of the biggest losses I had when I left my previous job was that I no longer had a working copy of Microsoft Office. Say what you want about MS, but the Office tools are pretty much a standard. My initial solution was to turn to Google Docs. Aside from keeping my local hard drive free of work documents, Google Docs also had the advantage of facilating document sharing between my colleagues and myself.

Pretty soon however, I had to succumb and admit to myself that i needed an offline document suite, and that's when I turned to OpenOffice.org. So far, it's been able to handle all the MS Office documents that I've received and it hasn't really given me any headaches. My one complaint is that it still can't handle Visio files. :p

Project Management

BasecampHQ - This one was set-up by the office. It's enabled a handful of us developers to coordinate and work with our project managers and superiors and keeps a nice time log of our activites.

GitHub - Another tool selected by the office. I'd been using the basic git tool with our senior dev for the past year. Recently, the company adopted git as a whole to facilitate code sharing. All I can say is, this would have made my life so much easier in my old companies. Sigh.

That wraps it up for me for now. Those are the top aids that I use daily. There probably are better alternatives out there, but so far, these haven't failed me yet. I've rarely touched a pen and paper to help organize my work since I started using these. :) That says something about how useful they are.

Welcome!

Please, make yourselves at home.

I'm B, the other half of this project. As a brief introduction, I am, as M has mentioned, a work at home dad. This has been my professional set-up for nearly a year now. I'm more into the back-end side of IT as opposed to my partner who usually fronts to the customers. :)

Please bear with me as I get my feet wet and shake my writing cobwebs off as this is also my first official blog (took me long enough I guess).

I promise a lengthier and more detailed introduction about my work from home experience next time.

Welcome to the Work @ localhost blog!

Welcome dear readers to a project that a good friend, B, and I just decided to do. I'm M, a work from home mom and IT professional while B is a work at home dad and IT professional. We actually live in two different cities and do two different jobs. However we both have one thing in common and that is we practice our profession solely out of the comfort of our own homes.

Please stay tuned for our next posts as we discuss how we got into the work from home gig, what the benefits are and what we do to maintain a professional outlook while working remotely.