Ask HN: Remote Developers, what tools/apps you wish you had? [for product idea]
Remote jobs are getting really popular now, and I'm curious to know about the potential for new products/apps for remote workers. E.g. nomadlist
If you are a remote developer, do you have any particular tool/app/website that you wish existed and would make your life easier?
31 comments
[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadPredictably priced universal 4G plan that bills to my bank account.
Biometric border control (leave passport at home)
Clean, high quality scooter helmets rental (I'd pay premium for this)
Bitcoin ATM to avoid local banks high fees (i.e. Thailand and Philippines ATMs charge foreign cards a lot)
Plane-UberPool for small charter flights
For the helmet surely you could take your own if you rent scooters that much?
If your normally traveling baggage is a backpack with laptop and a change of clothes then the scooter helmet quickly becomes a pain in the ass to lug around.
I just bought a stroller that folds up small enough to fit into my laptop bag.
What's the value here? You can't lose the passport?
Check out Google's Project Fi: https://fi.google.com
Here are their international rates: https://fi.google.com/about/rates/
Is the world not big enough? Can people not go their own ways?
- low cost of living
- pleasant climate
- decent infrastructure
- interesting, diverse culture
- being generally welcoming to foreigners (to those with somewhat big pockets at least)
You get some of those traits in many other non-South-East-Asian countries as well but all of them combined is a pretty rare occurrence.
Linguistically at least Latin America should be much more accessible to most people.
I was in a very small surf town on the Pacific coast with a strong ex-pat presence.
In a past life I played a lot of online poker, and was able to travel without any cash just by meeting fellow poker players and exchanging USD for cash at whatever the local rate was. There are definitely more developers than online poker players, so the liquidity of a peer-to-peer BTC (or other coin) forex marketplace would be high. Does something like this exist for remote workers?
1. You have a computer (the Instant Pinger) setup. All it is is a monitor with a webcam and a faster internet connection, in addition to a small computer that can run the Instant Pinger and a keyboard, with super high quality mic.
2. When anyone (presumably an employee) sits in front of the Instant Pinger they're instantly, and automatically connected to you. You will immediately appear on the monitor and they will appear on yours. Text, video, and screen sharing will activated from your end to the monitor.
3. When they leave the connection immediately closes. There's no need to press disconnect for you are always "connected" to begin with.
Why?
Many say the serendipity of the office is what allows great ideas to spread. The Instant Pinger recreates this with an always on connection, and "presence to talk" messaging. A light could even be installed on the remote monitor to indicate whether or not the local (really remote) user is on their desk, or not.
I do think there might be obstacles in getting it set up for the remote employee (is there an always on software on remote employees' laptops? do they get shipped a separate InstantPing hardware? would there be an expectation that if someone InstantPings you, you're automatically put into a video conference with them because you're in front of your machine? etc...)
That said, if you could get past those obstacles I think this would be a great idea to pursue. Spending minutes at a time getting a video chat set up is something I, and many other coworkers I've witnessed, have had to do plenty of times and it's frustrating. There definitely doesn't seem to be a good professional video solution for "hey let's quickly and easily sync up with Facetime-level ease." I attribute that to most vendors trying to be everything while focusing on group meetings, which invariably makes the start-the-conference phase of the video chat the most annoying.
Maybe take this software/hardware hybrid and put it in each conference room. You flick a switch, press a contact name (employee email address) and it just happens. Remote employees could get something like a small, 1080p webcam with a software that allows them to choose to be away by default (connection doesn't happen if someone InstantPings them). Then if they change status they and the partner automatically broadcast to each other without any need to do something once the "mothership" (conference room in office) InstantPings the remote webcam by email address. And both parties would have display on or an indication that they're present so neither can be "watched" with knowing. Integrate with SSO for Google/Microsoft/Slack and it could be a real timesaver.
I have utterly no domain knowledge here other than being a remote employee, so take this as uneducated enthusiasm. But if I felt this way and actually worked in the video conferencing space, I'd build it.
I've done more lifetime remote dev work than onsite work. Happy to answer more detailed questions if you're interested. Have fun!
My company uses that fairly extensively with no issues.
I haven't worked on a team where everyone was happy with hangouts. Yeah, maybe a few people go "eh, works, no major issues", but that's different from "we like using this software and increases our productivity". There's always some humor/a running joke when someone's sound dies, or we need to restart the call.
I also haven't observed any distributed company in my network where they had >15 engineers and haven't invested in some paid software with collaboration features beyond hangouts: Zoom, Bluejeans, Screenhero (if a face-to-face video isn't needed, or rarely). One example, pairing: being able to "drive" your coworker's screen for a few minutes without no setup is better than Floobits. Hangouts does not allow this. I believe on some browsers you also can't see the sharer's mouse.
Does that answer your question? Defnitely curious, to learn of other remote teams' tools, and what works for them. I'd love to hear more about what your workflow is like and what you like about it.
Our hangout usage is mostly for meetings, which are just check-ins and planning meetings. Typically during the course of a meeting several people will briefly screenshare what they're working on, and a typical meeting involves multiple time-zones and states (although we're all US-based).
Sometimes pairing is done using hangouts, which isn't the best solution, but also isn't overly inhibiting. We are a small company, but > 15 developers.
I've never wanted to drive the coworker's screen, however I could see how that could be useful in many cases.
I'm not particularly thrilled with hangouts, in the same way I'm not particularly thrilled with, say, ssh--but it has always gotten the job done and allowed me to share my screen with others painlessly.
For us, where everyone is remote (I haven't seen my team's faces for over 6 months), the marginal utility of a tool's delightfulness/stability is quite high. Maybe we're just picky. :)