Working From Paris

How NodeSource Helped
Us Rethink Our Office

I’m sitting outside Le Pure Cafe in the 11th arrondissement, laptop open, sipping my third espresso of the chilly afternoon, surrounded by a mix of travelers and locals. It’s still early morning in New York, and messages from the team at Code Morris are starting to pop up on Slack while I revise a shared Google Doc. Later today, we’ll have a meeting across four time zones using UberConference and Worklife.

I’m taking a month-long “workcation” in Paris, and it happened because of NodeSource.

PoV: Working from a quiet spot on the bank of The Seine

To Office or Not to Office

When I first met Joe McCann, NodeSource’s CEO and co-founder, he explained that the company was “Distributed by Design,” meaning they have no central office or headquarters. Instead employees work from wherever they choose, anywhere in the world. Going officeless is an idea that Joe, and co-founder Dan Shaw, are passionate about, and that makes sense since it parallels the modular nature of applications developed in Node.

Working with NodeSource let us see the flexibility of this distributed architecture first-hand. Our teams collaborate entirely in the cloud and members of the NodeSource crew connect from all over the world — homes, Airbnbs, cafes, even beaches.

These interactions eventually inspired us to rethink our work environment at Code Morris. Being in a co-working space, we were already only loosely tied down. Security, networking, utilities, even coffee were all managed for us. My biggest commitment to the office was the coat hook that I installed in the wall myself. We asked ourselves if we should just abandon our office and go fully distributed too. We could skip the commutes and save money at the same time. The idea was compelling.

We deconstructed our processes, figuring out which parts of our work were location-specific and which weren’t, what communication needed to be real-time, and what could be asynchronous. It turned out that our jobs offered a lot more flexibility than we initially assumed.

Part of this newfound freedom was due to Slack, which NodeSource introduced us to last year. Within a couple weeks, Slack had become indispensable. It not only replaced GChat, texting and a lot of unwieldy email threads, but it replaced much of the casual office chatter as well.

We realized that we didn’t need to be near each other to work together. Physical proximity became an option instead of a requirement.

Ultimately, we decided to keep our office, but with a fresh perspective. Letting go of the idea that work is about a being in the same building allowed us to look at our space with fewer assumptions and more intent. It was like discovering a company benefit that we never realized we had.

As the summer began, we experimented with spreading out a little.

LEFT: The roof at The Yard makes it worth coming into the office. RIGHT: Andy’s beachfront view in Connecticut is hard to beat as a work environment.

LEFT: Katie works from a cafe in Los Angeles. CENTER: Zach chats on Slack from his family’s juice bar in New Jersey. RIGHT: Poolside conference calls in LA are a thing.

Andy Morris, our CEO, began occasionally working from his beachfront house in Connecticut. I’d often work from my couch or cafes in Brooklyn. We still mostly continued to show up at the office, but working remotely proved to be a remarkably seamless experience. Katie, our Senior Account Director, fell in love with Los Angeles and decided to move there permanently. Now she has a desk at a co-working space on the left coast and not much has changed.

So when I mentioned moving to Paris for a month, along with my girlfriend, Andy’s reaction was “of course you should.”

A few weeks later, I did.

Moveable Feasts Beat Free Lunches

Ernest Hemingway described the experience of living in Paris as “a moveable feast” — an experience that stays with you for the rest of your life. That sentiment is at least as true today as when he wrote it nearly a century ago. The difference is that now you don’t need to be a foreign correspondent or a novelist to work from anywhere. The Internet has made a limitless number of moveable feasts possible.

LEFT: Getting my cafe on at L’Etoile Manquante. RIGHT: Rainy Paris days are the best.

LEFT: At Pavillon des Canaux in the 19th arrondissement you can work from from an old clawfoot tub. RIGHT: Our home for a month in the 11th arrondissement.

Paris has been a great place to work. The ubiquitous cafe terraces and temperate climate are very complimentary to lingering well into the evening. And for someone who isn’t much of a morning person, getting a six hour head start on New York time is great.

Traveling Tools

Preparing to work from overseas required surprisingly little planning. Most of my preparation consisted of researching wireless data options. The last thing I wanted was to live abroad only to be stuck at home for connectivity.

These are the tools that made working and living overseas possible:

• MacBook Air and iPhone — These might seem obvious, but they’re worth mentioning. Given that my last trip to Paris involved bringing a video camera, an SLR, various lenses, batteries, a heavy laptop, extra batteries, assorted chargers, and a myriad of cables, connectors, and adaptors, I was surprised by how little I packed this time. My iPhone has not only replaced all of the camera equipment, but paper books and maps too.
• Slack — I mentioned this above, but the level of continuous partial connectedness that Slack offers creates a genuine sense of being “at work” without feeling intrusive.
• Google Apps — For all of the benefits of asynchronous communication that Slack offers, there’s something intimate about collaborating on documents in real-time, even if those other cursors are being driven by keyboards an ocean away. Google Docs makes me never want to open another Word attachment with tracked changes as long as I live.
• UberConference — We had already switched to UberConference for conference calls, but the ability to connect over the web was a requirement since I deactivated my phone number for the month. Skype credits are also a good backup option when you absolutely need to call a landline. Google Hangouts offers a similar feature as well.
• Portable 4G WiFi Hotspot — Renting a portable WiFi hotspot from HippoPocketWifi turned out to be the best option for Internet connectivity in Paris, since public WiFi is often slow and unreliable. Even with an unlocked phone, pre-paid SIM options can be cumbersome to activate and recharge, and it’s difficult to tell which plans and providers enable Mobile Hotspot functionality to connect a laptop. In the end, for two people with phones and laptops who are mostly sticking together, renting a portable WiFi hotspot was the best choice. The money we saved by disabling our U.S. wireless accounts for the month basically paid for the rental — about $150 for 15GB of 4G data. This means no texting or traditional voice calls, but truthfully, I haven’t noticed. iMessage, FaceTime, Hangouts, and Skype are keeping me connected here as well as they did in NYC.
• Credit Card — I ended up getting a chip-and-PIN enabled Barclaycard with no foreign transaction fee. Chip-and-PIN cards aren’t a requirement in Europe, but they work where swipe-only US cards often don’t (like self-serve Metro kiosks).

This list is by no means exhaustive. Language barriers can be challenging. Managing everything from physical mail to ATM fees becomes more complicated. Healthcare and medications are tricky away from home. And as much as companies like AirBnB and Uber can make the digital nomad lifestyle feel frictionless, airports are happy to remind you that it isn’t.

But compared to staying put, the tradeoffs have been worth it.

There and Back Again

Reimagining our office as a choice instead of a given opened up new possibilities that we hadn’t considered: exploring the world while working, living in new places instead of squeezing travel into short vacations, and defining a lifestyle instead of having one defined by a job. Just having the option to live in a less expensive city is a valuable benefit.

Instead of competing to offer perks like free lunches and foosball, companies might want to focus more on lifestyle benefits. Research has shown that experiences, not things, ultimately make people happier. You don’t need to be chained to a desk, an office, or even a country to be productive.

Even if I don’t end up traveling continuously, there’s still value in staying more loosely coupled to physical locations, paring down possessions and staying more mobile for when the next opportunity to work from anywhere comes along.

NodeSource is a client of Code Morris. All photos in this piece are copyright Sean Fitzroy, or their respective owners and used with permission.

Published in #SWLH (Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking)

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