I have been working at home now for almost eleven years. When my job first started, it was the first time that a software developer worked remotely in my company. There were many barriers before this time but luckily my timing was good.
Currently I am working on a project that is looking at using Cloud-based technology to make it easier for existing customers. All of my development happens near Brisbane, Australia whereas my nearest office is in Sydney. This works well with the help of products like GoToMeeting. In fact, there is a need to use it almost every day. It is my view into what is happening in Sydney and sometimes I even use it to share what I have at home.
It is so common to use GoToMeeting, it is just part of everyday work. Without it, it would be much harder to convey important computer-based information.
Anyways, something different happened this last weekend. On Sunday I was packing up for my trip to Sydney for a three day event in the office. I was working on a difficult problem at the time and was very frustrated that I could not figure it out before the trip. Usually this means that I need to move the problem environment to my work machine in Sydney and continue from there. The problem with that is that my Sydney machine is not as strong as my Brisbane machine and does not have all the things that I need day to day. In fact, the Sydney machine is a subset of my usual environment.
Usually I just accept this situation. However, the size of the problem and the lack of time made this unacceptable. In the last hour before I had to leave, I decided that I should try using GoToMyPC to get access to my development machine from Sydney. I still had an account that I had not used for awhile so I had to reset the password and get things going again. However, within about a half an hour, it was running.
When I got to Sydney, I connected to my development machine and it worked great. In fact it was so good to have my native environment I wondered why I had not tried it before. It takes away the need to duplicate the environment somewhere else and it is quick enough to use without frustration. The best aspect is that it just works.
Because I still had access to my main machine, it made it so much easier and quicker to solve the problems that happened. Without access to GoToMyPC, it would have easily taken twice as long to figure this out. It would have been very hard to reach the deadline in time without it.
This is a true story that recently happened. I am very glad that this worked and it reduced my stress level in a big way.
Live near Brisbane, Australia. Software developer currently focused on iOS and Android. Avid Google Local Guide
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