Ask HN: tools for collaboration with a remote cofounder | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: tools for collaboration with a remote cofounder

9 pointsnnd8 comments

We are a team of two: I'm a developer and my cofounder is a designer. We work remotely and constantly looking for ways to improve our communication to make it as close as possible to a real-life interaction when it comes to efficiency.

So far, that's what we've got (we try to stick to free tools):

* Skype for video conferencing

* Screenhero for screen sharing

* Dropbox for file sharing

* Shared ical calendars

* Useful links shared by email/twitter

Works out alright so far, except for the last one. It's difficult to keep track and organize useful content, maybe a wiki would do here.

I've tried to use Asana for task management on previous project with 3+ people and it was quiet efficient. For a team of two I feel like it would be an overkill, as we are always up-to-date with each others progress by having daily skype status calls.

Which tools do you use?

View on HN

We (yunojuno) use the following (+ other stuff - https://www.yunojuno.com/colophon/)

* BitBucket (core app, private)

* GitHub (FOSS projects, public)

* Trello - tracking progress

* HipChat - IM

* Basecamp - dates, discussions, project type stuff

* Google - docs, shared calendars, Hangouts

* Screenhero - screen sharing

We've almost managed to remove email from our daily flow - I very rarely send / receive internal emails now.

HipChat + Trello have become our foundation tools - couldn't live without them. (The new Trello attachments view has plugged a gap, and made sharing designs much easier than it used to be.)

HipChat is brilliant once you move on to building stuff - plug in code commits, deployments, customer service (we have Zendesk alerts) etc.

I would absolutely agree with your last point - sharing links + discussions around links is the biggest problem by far - Google+ is a perfect fit, but (our) people just seem resistant to it. I've tried, and failed, several times to get everyone to adopt it. We have a bunch of iOS people and they often share direct from Flipboard, which may be part of it.

HipChat is an absolute beauty ... We can not survive with out Hipchat and Asana ...

This is a great list ..

Probably the reason why Google+ is not working is, no one is really on Google+ :)... Have you tried Facebook Secret Groups?

OneNote is pretty good for shared documentation. If you use a Notebook shared via SkyDrive and turn on "Sync automatically", it works really well. For example, if both of you edit the same page, but different parts of it, it manages to do a graceful merge of both of your work and not show a conflict. You have to fiddle with the exact same sentence for it to conflict, in my experience.

I suggest 2+ Sections in your notebook : one dedicated to planning, TODOs, and the like, and one section for shared knowledge. Your "Useful links" would go here.

The planning section we have has individual pages for : Business Paths, Quarterly Goals, Work To Be Done, and Daily Worklog (updated at EOD). That's it! From vision to actual work in one place. Let me know if you need more info. We invested time to design the Planning section, and it has really helped.

This setup probably doesn't scale to beyond 3 people, but it works really well in keeping everyone on the same page for up to 3 people.

What we use:

* Skype / Facetime for videoconferencing

* Misc. chat apps

* Dropbox / Google Drive for file sharing

* Some git repos on a VPS box for source control

* Google calendar for calendars

* pinboard.in for link sharing (not perfect, but does the job)

* trello for project / business management

* Google Docs - for pairing on writing documents

* CrashPlan - for backups

* Office 365 - for dealing with MS docs from other people. LibreOffice just doesn't seem to cut it enough unfortunately when it comes to document exchange.

umm - I would recommend a cheap hosted git account on something like RepositoryHosting/XP-Dev . It's definitely not worth managing the VPS git repos yourselves.

It's not ;-)

Really it's just inertia. We were using git before repositoryhosting, github, etc. were around - and what we have works fine, is backed up, etc. Changing it isn't worth the pain involved.

Email Phone Calls Github ( Source code hosting + Issue Tracker ) Skype Google+ , Docs

Surprised that no one is mentioning email.

linkydink.io is pretty good for link sharing, in my view, partic for the daily digest

Reply on news.ycombinator.com