In 2020 I wrote a post titled “Are you working remotely? You should be ready to hit the road at any time”, at that time I knew little about what was to come and this pandemic made me rethink lots of stuff I use to do for remote work. Remote work is so ordinary that it is no longer cool, but the subject remains.

In 2022 do I still think we should be ready to hit the road at any time? YES, I do. And the ultimate test came on Feb-28 when I was preparing for an essential meeting in the company I am consulting. We debugged some performance problems in the network stack for months, and we finally scheduled a working session with the corporative network teams. That team manages the network for over 10k people +200 apps divided across AWS, Google, and Azure for the whole organization, so it takes a lot of time to schedule a long working session with them.

Three hours before the meeting, the city where I live had an entire city power outrage, which had never happened before. After 30 minutes, it was clear that I would not be able to join the call if I stayed home, and the meeting would have to be rescheduled. As I was “ready to hit the road at any time,” so I did.

Within 10 minutes, I prepared my backpack and jumped in my car, and I was ready to find the closest calm place with energy and internet where I could finish my needed work.

Then I hit the road

It became a fun quest to find a workable place, and I did not have to go too far, 30Km (or ~18,6 miles) from home. Finally, I found one nice restaurant where I like to have lunch on the weekends, and it was fully operating. I stopped and worked for over 4 hours, took part in the crucial working session, and had no problem finishing my daily tasks while facing the worst power outage in the city in the last five years.

This situation could have been a source of stress, or we could have lost the opportunity to work with the network team and would have to reschedule a new sync maybe days later. But instead, it was one of the funniest moments of my week, and the working session went pretty well.

There is no way I would choose to kill the mobility of a few extra Gigs of memory or to save a couple of thousands of dollars on the machine.

This was only one recent example, but I could nominate many others to justify it. Check out my old post Here to see my points about Focus increasing, Get more things done, Working with friends, Attending conferences and much more that can come from being ready to hit the road.

The bad pats

I got to admit sometimes it is hard, and I am facing a few performance problems with my corporative MacBook because I need to run too many processes for a specific task (2 backend services, one integration emulator, teams, slack + our election app in development mode), I see the MacBook freaking out to handle all that, maybe I should experiment some Cloud development env and free up the MacBook resource, but that would block offline working. Well, I rarely work in my everyday job offline anyways.

This is something to experiment with later. See you in the following posts.