Working together despite the distance: The story of the appearance of Remote.st

Hello! About 2 weeks ago, an article “1000 words about real experience of remote work ” appeared on Habré. That article described our experience of remote work, prior to the creation of the Remote.st service.
Today I will talk about the causes and history of the appearance of Remote.st


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Out of 11 years of my working career, about half the time I work in distributed teams. And I think that working in one room, at the same table is much more efficient than when the team is scattered around the world. It is much faster and easier to approach a person and ask a question that interests you, or discuss the problem that arises, than try to do it through text chat (we used Jaconda.im), or call him in Skype or Hangouts.

But the reality is that more and more people in the world work remotely. And I feel this trend on me. My team at shopium.ua consisted of cool developers scattered throughout Ukraine. The creative agency of my partner in Remote.st (Kir Gorshkov) has been winning ten years for 4 years and doing the coolest advertising for companies like Coca-Cola, Panasonic, Roshen, TetraPak, Hyundai, and at the same time their office is used only for meeting with clients, and employees also move freely around the world. I spent the past six months on Koh Samui in Thailand, from where I worked with my team.

I always knew that in distributed teams communication suffers first and foremost. It is difficult to provide the necessary density of information exchange. Everyone knows that when talking 1-on-1, up to 80% of the information is non-verbally transmitted. When working all the same. There are many small, not very important pieces of information that are not individually worth it for them to "call a meeting" in the Hangouts, but knowing that you can do your job better.

Redmine, Basecamp, Megaplan, Teamlab, Bitrix24, KanbanFlow, Trello: all of them are focused on the left hemisphere of the brain, and perfectly, structurally store and show the current state of the project. But there are very few daily project management tools that target the right hemisphere: non-verbal information, intuition, emotions, relationships, dreams.

So, at the intersection of these facts, the idea of ​​Remote.st

What is Remote.st

In Remote.st, we tried, without falling into skecuomorphism, to bring the feeling of working in one room as close as possible.

Entering the room you immediately see which of your colleagues is working now.



In the first version, we always showed live video for each participant, but video encoding / decoding gave a serious load on the CPU, and working at the computer was not comfortable. Therefore, in the usual, "passive" mode, we show photos that are updated every 2 seconds.

After Kira’s girlfriend left the Remout and went into the bathroom with the computer, they added a little privacy, now the pictures are pixelated.

Clicking on any person for 1-2 seconds opens with him a video stream. If you are already in a conversation, clicking on the person adds it to your current conversation. At the same time in the room can be any number of conversations. Participants in the same conversation are marked by the same color.

And that's all.

That was enough to feel the effect. People working in distributed teams will understand me. While you are working remotely, the employees feel that they have I / O tasks. They set the task for you, you did it, moved to a new one. And that's all. Over time, this turns into a handful of unmotivated freelancers.

With Remout, the situation is changing. Remout stimulates spontaneous communication. Instead of an hour and a half conference once a week in Hengauts, where two people simultaneously communicate, and the rest pretend not to sleep, we get 20-40 “conversations” in Remout with an average length of about 5 minutes, which occur exactly when they are needed and between those who need them.

The work has become more “course checks”, brief communication sessions on which the current progress on the task is discussed, and the decision how to develop it further. Due to the reduction in time for feedback, the performance of the team, according to my estimates, increased by 10-15%. But most importantly, the guys in the team began to communicate more with each other. And Kira girls began to paint in the morning, before work, the guys are pleased with the eye. This is no longer a flock of unkempt freelancers in stretched T-shirts, but a team of employees.

What does it all work

Technically, Remote is a Python backend (Flask, PostgreSQL, Gevent, Gevent-websocket) and front-end is a one-page JS (AngularJS) application. WebRTC is used for video transmission. In the current version of the video peer-to-peer is transmitted between the participants. For voice input, the Web Speech API is used . As STUN / TURN server is used rfc5766-turn-server .

Answers to frequently asked questions

Current state

For the first month of closed beta, we have 500+ users from almost 170 companies.
Russia, Ukraine, USA, Canada, Australia - the main countries of residence of users.
The ratio of Russian-speaking users to English-speaking, about 70 to 30. We received positive feedback from famous people. We have completed basic scenarios and opened free registration.

Thanks

We express our gratitude to our families, who together with us are experiencing all the successes and falls,
Separately, to everyone who is not indifferent to the project and supporting it with its advice
We always read you, listen, discuss your comments and take into account.
This is a service for people.

What's next?

The project has already passed beta testing. We already took off. The service is used by many companies. And more and more I want to share it with others, so for all habrovchan until 01/09/13 there is an action :
Register on https://remote.st/ and write to support@remote.st the code phrase “I'm c Habra”, with reference to your profile on Habr, and the address you registered with Remote, and I will add you a month of free use service.