Working Remotely from the South Pacific
There’s remote work and then there’s REMOTE work. The former is working from home in a major metropolitan area in the United States. REMOTE work on the other hand is working from a tiny island thousands of miles away from the US mainland. Over the years I’ve had a few stints working remotely from the South Pacific and it’s amazing how well it worked!
South Pacific
The Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific is a second home for me. The small archipelago lies 1800 km north of New Zealand and 8600 km from Los Angeles. The population is about 100,000. To put it succinctly, it’s REMOTE.
I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga and met my wonderful wife there as well. Though we’ve been living in the States for the past decade, we’ve made several months-long trips back to Tonga. These happy occasions gave me the opportunity to really stress test working remotely from the South Pacific.
Internet
Internet connectivity is the one non-negotiable for just about every remote developer. In a place like Tonga, this can be a challenge.
Although Tonga has recently been connected to the Southern Cross Cable providing fibre optic connectivity to the main islands of the country. It’s quite amazing that a place as remote as Tonga is now fully on board the high speed internet.
It wasn’t long ago however that Tonga relied solely on geostationary satellite communication to connect to the outside world. This mode of communication meant a latency of around 600ms in the best of circumstances.
Surprisingly, while this may matter greatly if you’re trying to play Call of Duty, it actually didn’t matter that much for real world development.
On each trip back to Tonga I had WiMax internet set up at our home. A quick install by the ISP provider of a wireless antenna mounted on a pole had me up and running in an hour.
Home Office
I use the phrase home office a little loosely here as will soon become apparent. Some people’s office is a coffee shop where all that’s needed is a laptop and an internet connection.
My office was a small 8’ x 10’ corrugated tin shack. Inside I sat on an REI camp chair with my laptop and I might as well have been working at the local US Starbucks. Though incidentally Tonga does not have a Starbucks or even a McDonald’s for that matter. Being REMOTE has its virtues!
For extra comfort I’d keep a cheap fan blowing in the shack as Tonga is quite hot and humid most of the year. Mosquito coils were also a necessity to keep the blood thirsty mozzies at bay especially in the early morning hours.
Work
It’s natural to assume that working remotely from the South Pacific would be difficult. It’s also easy to assume that being several time zones away and having a long-distance internet connection could be problems. Ultimately, I found these assumptions easily refutable when faced with the reality of my own experience.
I attended numerous conference calls while in my little tin shack home office in Tonga. I signed up for a US Skype phone number and forwarded my US office phone to this number while I was abroad. This made it easy to communicate by phone or IM, which were the primary means of communicating at this former small employer.
It did take a little longer to connect over the network to resources back in the US. For instance, my local development environment app server would usually take about 2 minutes to start up.
Over a satellite internet connection it took about 4 minutes to start up. Fortunately, tools at the time like JRebel and File Sync allowed for hot swapping of changes to eliminate the need for frequent app server restarts. This was in the pre-cloud days where on-prem data centers were the norm.
One of the more interesting things I did was connect via NoMachine, which is a Remote Desktop app, to my office computer back in the United States. It worked though!
You’d think over a satellite internet connection that it’d be completely untenable, but while certainly a little slow it was doable. It’s not something I’d recommend for more than the occasional operation yet it’s still amazing that it was even functional.
On one occasion I had to reload hundreds of thousands of rows in Salesforce from an ETL job. In spite of the distance though, I was able to successfully run the ETL job from a tin shack in Tonga.
Of course these days with Tonga having a fibre optic cable backbone, these kinds of things would no longer even be surprising. The distance just doesn’t matter that much any more.
Summary
This is ultimately a case study of working remotely from the South Pacific as a java developer. It proves that whether you are in a coffee shop in the US or a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific, your location just doesn’t matter that much any more.
As long as you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can do your work and do it well. You might even work better from a tiny island as you no longer have to deal with the stresses of the modern US urban existence. A clear mind is a tremendous competitive advantage.