Innovate: a remote story.

So we tried Slack, a sentence from their first ad which is actually true. At Innovate we have a team in 3 countries in 4 locations. With in the past even more. Managing to work together when it is impossible to just walk to each other is perfectly possible these days. And Slack helps us a lot with this.

The team

Currently we exist of 4 people. Me, Aaron Gregory, Ethan Gates and Léo Lam. Aaron and Ethan are based in the UK. While me and Léo live on the European mainland in Belgium and France. In the past we had co-workers in several countries like Italy even to New Zealand. This is possible as we also serve a worldwide market, we have customers in almost every continent in the world.

The “office”

While we do have physical offices we don’t care what is on the wall there, most of the communication is done via the glass cables under the sea instead of the coffee machine in the corner. We have a channel for everything we need to care about. From general stuff to the network and of course some random jokes. Thanks to the power of Slack we have every info we need within the chat. Take the development channel for example where the CI sends logs and even commits are logged.

With Slack we also connected vital info such as support questions and answers so everybody can follow these. Maya is an automated system that does a few checks on every new ticket.

The coffeeshop

Meeting new people from your own home? Yep, that is where Slackline comes in. Slackline is a tool made to connect different teams/companies but they have opened several communities of different teams that are connected via Slackline. We have communities around Apple, Javascript, frontend dev, Node.js, Docker or the general “hi how are you” channel.