A Frog in the Valley

Being in the process of rethinking our office space (this is a nice side-effect that comes with funding… growing), I appreciate the perspective from Ask the Wizard: No Offices. I must say I am really divided on the subject. On one hand, I think there’s lots of merit to the Spolsky school of thought and having a quiet environment to “get in the zone”. But the energy level, instant communication and transparency that comes from an open space is awesome (for a small team).

That’s the way we are setup right now, a large round table that can sit 4-5 people. But there’s the “people doing phone calls” problem, even if the information is not confidential, they *are* noisy (sorry Harry, you are doing a *great* pitch, but I’ve heard it many, many times now). I have my headphones on to concentrate on this post, just because of that… it works only partially.

One key aspect of my thought process now, compared to my other earlier startups, is that communication, collaboration and development tools have arrived at a certain maturity level. We have been working on this project for a year now with wikis, campfire, email lists, instant messaging and distributed development process (snv, trac, etc) and things are moving forward quite nicely. But these tools are not perfect, the major missing factor is the energy level, it can be transmitted thru those methods of work but it’s much more work and less intuitive… so as we look at our options and how to configure our actual workspace for maximum efficiency, there’s still a lot of questions to ask ourselves…