How a Solutions Architect in Rural Australia Built a Life Around Remote Work — and His Kids

Rheinard Korf's commute is about a minute long. Walk out the back door, cross the yard and enter the converted garage that doubles as his office. No traffic, no cubicle — just the bush outside and, inside, the kind of deep-focus environment that took him nearly a decade of career pivots to engineer.

Korf is a Solutions Architect at X-Team, operating out of a town of 24,000 people in rural Australia. He has twin daughters, a young son and a wife who, by his own admission, was the one who suggested he move his workday out of the house. For most of his professional life, remote work wasn't a perk — it was the deliberate outcome of choices he made long before distributed teams became common. In this story, Korf traces the winding path from adult-education trainer to full-time remote developer, explains how he structured a household that runs on flexibility without chaos and shares the practical rules that let him be both present as a parent and productive as an engineer.

A Decade of Detours Before Going Fully Remote

Korf started programming before he was 12 years old. In his late teens — between 1999 and 2002 — he was already doing freelance coding for small businesses and, a few years later, system integration work inside factories, building GSM modem front-ends for machine alarms and monitoring systems for industrial scales and SCADA equipment. The work was technical and hands-on, but the path forward looked like one thing: move to the city, take a cubicle job.

He wasn't interested in that. So he pivoted to education instead, spending nearly a decade teaching programming to adults across multiple campuses. The arrangement let him travel rather than commute — connecting remote students via video conference, training other instructors across the state. But over time, bureaucracy crept in. "Policies and politics entered the scene," he says, "and I ended up teaching compliance and less innovative practices."

He left for a smaller training organization, trading income for satisfaction, and eventually negotiated two or three days a week at home. That experiment changed his thinking. "I realized I was more productive working from home," he says. "It was the first time I thought I could work remotely all the time."

The plan he put in motion: build something he could sell independently. He made a WordPress plugin during vacation time, tested it at his organization and launched it as a premium product. "I had my first sale only hours after launch," he says. "The next day, I had more sales come in. It was then that I realized that what I was taught about work was wrong." The plugin gave him a portfolio. The portfolio gave him his first post-teaching gig at a major plugin agency. From there he landed at XWP — now integrated into the X-family — and by 2014, he hadn't worked a conventional job since.

The Garage, the Cuddle Rule and Other Household Systems

When Korf first transitioned to full-time remote work, the family home was the office. His daughters were still young and adapted quickly — they knew no other arrangement than dad disappearing behind a closed door in the morning and reappearing theatrically at lunch. "At lunchtime I'd emerge and make a big thing of it that 'daddy is home!'" he says.

The friction came later, when the impulse to intervene in every childhood dispute started pulling him out of focused work. "The big challenge is when kids are being kids and I have to discipline myself not to run out of the office every time they cry or get into an argument with one another," he says. His wife's suggestion — get out of the house — became the solution.

He drew up plans for a dedicated office, initially a closed-off back veranda. When he modeled it in 3D at full scale, his wife vetoed it; she didn't want to look at him through the kitchen window all day. Plan B: divide the garage and convert the rear half. His father was an electrician who had built the family's houses, and Korf had spent years watching him work. The conversion went smoothly. "I am happy to say that it is still standing and working a charm as an office," he says. "In fact, I think it's more structurally stable than it was before the conversion."

Out of that physical separation came a cleaner set of household rules. Core hours run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with flexibility built in through a morning check-in about the day's priorities. And there is one standing exception to any focused-work boundary: "There is always time for a cuddle," he says. He stops whatever he's doing — meetings excluded — whenever one of his kids needs a hug. Always.

For attention management, he leans on Getting Things Done, which he rereads annually, not as a strict GTD practitioner but as a reset mechanism. Deep-work blocks are the goal, though some projects don't permit them — in those cases, short focused stints and structured breaks replace the longer sessions. Stretch habits that once required software reminders are now instilled by repetition.

What Remote Work Actually Gives a Family

The lifestyle Korf describes is not glamorous in the influencer-remote-work sense — no co-working cafes in Bali, no week-long workcations in Europe. The family is, by his description, composed of homebodies. They take day trips and overnight adventures. If he's asked to work on-site for a client at significant distance during a school holiday, the whole family comes along. He remembers a family workation in Sydney fondly. Otherwise, they stay close to home — and that's the point.

Not living in a city means the kids walk 10 minutes to school. It means Korf attends assemblies, chapel services and school concerts. On Friday mornings, he volunteers in the classroom. None of that would be possible if he were commuting into an office in a regional hub, let alone a capital city.

The people around him still don't quite know what to make of it. Friends joke that he doesn't really work. His accountant — who handles his annual tax lodgement — still seems puzzled. "He thought it was the funniest thing when I told him that I was a Software Architect," Korf says. "He barely accepts Software Engineering." Working at enterprise scale from a rural town of 24,000 is, he acknowledges, something that reads as implausible to people whose understanding of tech careers is anchored to geography.

But the career he built — from freelance plugin developer to Solutions Architect at a global remote company — is proof that technical ambition doesn't require a particular zip code. The office is a converted garage. The commute is a minute on foot. And every Friday morning, he's in a classroom, present for the things that can't be rescheduled.

Ready to build work you're proud of? Apply for an open role at X-Team.