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.