So looks like 2020 is the year of remote working for the whole lot of people. Hey, welcome to the club! Our team has been working remotely since 2013, and now we are distributed in 5 different time zones. For us remote working has been a lot of fun, all you need is the right setup that enables everybody to be connected and be productive.
We obviously couldn't do it without the digital infrstructure. Lately we've been getting a lot of requests for sharing tips for which tool or software to use for remote working, and we thought it'd be a good idea to share a practical list of tech stack we use in our daily business. So, here we go: remote working stack chez ungleich.
Before we continue, an important disclaimer: we’re an open-source, sustainability focused IT company. So we decide which tools to use by these criteria.
Now we have two chat systems, [Mattermost](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/zero-carbon-chat/) and [Matrix.](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/)
We are using hosted [Nextcloud](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/zero-carbon-cloud) for data storage and sharing. It supports cloud storage, file sharing between teams and real-time collaboration for document editing. It's pretty easy and we like to save data in Switzerland and not somewhere we don't trust how the authorities operate.
[Redmine](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/project-management/) is our longest standing project management tool since the beginning of our company. It supports calendar, ticket creating, issue tracking, wiki, roadmap and more.
Redmine is just very handy for managing multiple projects and subprojects, and giving access to different people can be done on a role basis. Our whole [data center infrastructure](https://redmine.ungleich.ch/projects/open-infrastructure) is actually in redmine & we open it for public, so you can take a look to get an impression.
We used GitHub before, but [we decided to move to our own Gitlab in 2018](https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/10/18/moving-away-github/) due to GitHub's lack of #IPv6 support and some other issues. We are very happy with our new home, and that's why we're hosting Gitlab for our customers too.
As we disclosed at the beginning, sustainability is an important factor for us so we run all of the above on our servers with renewable energy.
Many of you who are new to remote working might have to make decisions in a hurry, but try to remember that decisions with sustainability in mind saves a lot of pain in the long run, and also saves our environment.
It can be overwhelming when you need to decide what to use for a new style of work: you'll have to use it every day and you want to make a right decision. Our approach is that we know where are values stand such as decentralisation, open source, sustainability, and we try to make our decisions aligned to our values. For us working remotely with open source is fun and exciting, it gives so much freedom to everybody involved.
If you have any questions on above stack, our remote-working team is around to give you answers. ;) Stay healthy, and happy remote working to you all!
