Adventures in Telecommuting

I've been quiet lately because a lot has been going on. For family reasons not necessary to go into, I needed to relocate back to the DFW area fairly quickly. All the standard job-hunting ensued but as it turns out, my employers wanted to keep me and suggested that we undertake a grand experiment in telecommuting. I hadn't thought it would be an option, but I was glad of it since I really do like my job. Plus, any job where you can work with your dog's head on your lap while wearing pajamas is a big plus!

But, telecommuting is not without its snags. We have hit a number of networking issues in getting my environment set up. Most of them I won't go into details about, since I am no expert in networking and I would likely screw up the explanation. But, the problem that hit me the hardest and the fastest was that Visual Source Safe DOES NOT WORK REMOTELY. I mean, seriously, it takes about 10 minutes to check out one file, and I am not exaggerating. Now, I know VSS is old and crappy and we should be using something better, but I pick my battles - and it wasn't time for the source control battle in the past.

Now, my goal was to get back to my source code ASAP. Developing in a vacuum in a team environment is not feasible, and spending half the day checking files in and out wasn't an option. So, I asked some friends, and got a bunch of recommendations and ended up trying SourceOffSite from SourceGear. I now owe the friends who recommended it a beverage of their choice.

First of all, it was really easy to set up. The person who ended up setting up the server is not a technical person -- and he was able to do it from the directions with no problem. Installing the client was easy, and only required a couple odd steps. And then, it just worked. Lightning fast. I think it is faster than VSS was running locally. Plus, the interface is similar enough to VSS that I didn't need any manuals to figure out how to use it... I just took off running.

This is just awesome!

If all the other networking issues were as easy to solve, I would be stoked. (Alas, I feel bad for the nice guys in our IT department who are having to devote way too much of their time to get me up and running...I owe them beverages too, if they ever come visit me in the North, or if I ever come back for the day.)