I’ve been working from San Francisco, CA this week, as opposed to my normal Birmingham, UK. My wife was attending the ASCB conference here, so we decided to make a holiday of it and come together.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been as much holiday as we’d hoped – as I’ve suddenly got more work than expected – but for me, it’s proved to be a very useful and successful experiment in flexible working.

While I’ve been sitting in our apartment on Sutter Street, I’ve been continuing some web development work for clients in Memphis, TN & done some consulting for a client in London, followed up with a transatlantic training session via Skype.

My wife had a job interview in beautiful and (unusually) snowy Vancouver after the conference, so we spent a day there too. I ended up doing a couple of hours work there, including a Skype call to Memphis, all on my little laptop – which I bought last time I was in Vancouver.

Back in San Francisco now for a few days of proper holiday and then back to the UK for Christmas Eve – it’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks!

Tools for flexible working

There were a load of bits of software that helped to make seamlessly working on the road possible, even easy. My laptop is a HP NC6400 that’s been upgraded to 4Gb of Ram and runs the excellent Ubuntu Linux (Intrepid 8.10). This setup is easily capable of running a full LAMP stack, so I can develop websites on the go. I generally use gedit for code editing, setup basically like textmate as explained here, minus the ruby specific bits.

I keep a copy of everything – the contents of my /home folders from my desktop and laptop – in the cloud using SpiderOak. This means that I have rolling versioned backups of everything, automatically kept, all the time – this is very handy on its own. It also means that I can download anything from any of my computers, wherever I am, given internet access. This is very useful when you’re away from home, as you know that you can’t really forget anything – if it’s available on your desktop PC at home, then you can access it via SpiderOak.

As a last resort, Ubuntu ships with remote desktop support built in, so I can also just connect to my desktop PC over the internet and use it like I was at home, albeit rather slowly.

I also use Basecamp for project management which means that my clients and I can manage projects together and keep in touch, wherever I happen to be.

Those are the bits of software that really shone on this trip – but all the other little ones that I use everyday, most of which are open source, were also just as useful as they always are: gmail, pidgin/empathy, dropbox, firefox + firebug, tomboy, GnoTime, bazaar, etc…