For the first time since I joined Scimatic, I'm working from home. Which is a big change for me, since at my last job, all I did was telecommute.

In general, I'm a big fan of telecommuting and distributed groups. It's how I worked for the last seven years at my previous job, and I found that the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages. The primary advantage is one of efficiency:

• No commute. That saves (for me, currently) about an hour a day. More if I code in my pajamas.
• Far less noise. Even though our office is really good at keeping the noise down, there are still times where Steve or Jamie is on a conference call, and being an "open-concept" office (well, really a big room), those conversations can derail a train of thought.
• Far fewer interruptions. I managed to derail Jamie yesterday by asking if he wanted coffee at 10:30. I could actually see his brain seize up as he tried to finish what he was working on before his subconscious mind started thinking "mmmm, delicious coffee ..."      

There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that working solo is good for productivity. For example, Jason Fried of 37Signals mentioned in his Business of Software talk that when he and David Heinemeier Hansen worked remotely (one in Chicago, one in Denmark), they got tonnes done. And that fell apart for the first few months when DHH moved to Chicago. DHH has moved back to Sweden (across the bridge from Denmark), and I think that's helping him get Rails 2.2.0 out the door. And the gains from working solo seem to be derived from eliminating interruptions. It's no good to work at home if you're going to be interrupted by your kid, or the phone, or Champions League on ESPN ...

Working solo kind of enforces the lack of interruptions listed above. So in the office, I need to work on minimizing those interruptions. Joel Spolsky talks about this a lot as an advantage for hiring. His firm seems to be constantly moving offices so that he can always have his developers in their own offices, with doors that close, so they can go heads-down into the Zone and do what they are paid to do: code. This is a very attractive factor; something I didn't realise until it was gone. In my previous job, our COO wanted anyone calling our 1-800 number to reach a real human. Admirable goal. Unfortunately, it was implemented by having everyone's VoIP phone ring when anyone called the 1-800 number. So the developers were knocked out the zone by calls for the sales team, or wrong numbers, or even cold-calls for paper products. Worse, as more remote staff were added, including a new sales team, they conveniently didn't get VoIP phones. So the original developers became switchboard operators. I eventually turned my phone off, and other devs or support people would have to IM me to get me to turn on my phone if they wanted to talk to me.

There are disadvantages to telecommuting, such as a lack of distinction between work and home, and a lack of social interaction. The main one, for me, was a lack of interaction with other developers. Pair programming is hard when you're telecommuting. This lack of interaction was the main reason that I attended SciBarCamp, which led me to working here at Scimatic.

We'll work out how to get the best balance between the office and telecommuting. Probably one or two days a week at home, cranking away, and the rest in the office. We'll have to plan for the office days so we can bounce ideas off of each other in a focused way. Probably while we're drinking delicious coffee (mmmm) at Le Gourmand.