It’s official! All of the paperwork for a one-year working holiday trip to New Zealand is now complete. Melissa and I will be leaving September 1st, and returning August 2010.
I’ll be continuing to operate my web development company – Syllogistic Software Inc. – while I’m there. We have invested a huge amount of time and effort into “virtualizing” the company.
With clients in Toronto, London (Ontario), Vancouver, and Waterloo, plus employees in Kitchener, Montreal, and elsewhere, communication is paramount.
Our infrastructure spans the Internet, including a full virtual PBX phone system with multiple extensions and IVR via Trixbox. All company email, shared calendars, and documents are hosted on Google Apps. Source code is managed by Subversion.
The heart and soul of the operation is handled by an internal application we wrote, called simply the “Project Management System” (Update 2011-07-13: This is now called PMRobot). This allows precise, simple collaboration between clients and programmers and ensures that no request ever falls through the cracks.
It is now finally possible for someone with a laptop and Internet connection to collaborate and run a software development business as effectively in one place, as just about anywhere in the world.
Exciting times indeed!
Side note: Much thanks to Tim Ferriss for helping to inspire this vision.