Coboat, WeWork, PureHouse, the list goes on. Co-working continues to lose the spotlight to the new movement known as co-living (think co-working, but also living together).
Co-living is a brilliant idea, no doubt. And being that our company, X-Team, is 100% remote (spread across 30+ countries), we wanted to find a way to get our developers involved.
So in 2015, we became the first remote company with its own exclusive co-living space. And to keep the concept always fresh, we’d move the space every month to a new location.
We call it the X-Outpost, and we've just wrapped up nearly two years of hosting them.
How we did it
Creating a hacker house is incredibly costly and time consuming. Real estate, furniture, infrastructure, etc.
Or you could just rent a spacious, lavish Airbnb on a beautiful, affordable island.
Being that we like to innovate, iterate and move quickly, we went with the latter and were set to go with our first within a week.
And if all went well, we’d make many more of these spaces available to our developers. Needless to say, it went very well.
“This X-Outpost has been one of the best experiences of my life and definitely the best as a programmer, I will remember it kindly forever.” — Jason Brumwell, X-Team developer
There are dozens of other quotes just like that.
Activities
Picking an X-Outpost location with plenty of things to see and do is important.
We dedicate weekdays to working together either at home or cafes/coworking spots, and then evenings to seeing the nearby city.
We then use the weekends for organized activities, as well as "EPICs", which are the main event activity each month.
Surfing, hiking, ATV riding, LAN parties, swimming, night-life, and more are classic activities, while taking a yacht out for the weekend is an example of an EPIC.
And when the X-Outpost moves to the Transsiberian Express, the adventures get even more amazing.
Every X-Outpost is unique in its own way thanks to such a wide variety of locations we've chosen around the world.
Coworking
Another huge value for the developers who attended was the opportunity to get to work alongside other highly motivated, and incredibly talented developers with different skillsets and from different teams than their own.
The relationships built may have never happened over Slack, and those are not only new friendships, but colleagues you can call upon for technical advice in the future as well.
All within a far more comfortable and flexible environment than your traditional company office.
If you think this idea is cool, give this post some love and inspire others to start doing the same.