Blog: Behind the Scenes

What do you get when you throw 15 designers, coders and web-types into an open room, with workspaces, couches, fast Internet access and a good supply of coffee? Jelly.

The notion of casual coworking in a Jelly, or plainly, spending the odd weekday with a like-minded group of people, has gained a lot of momentum amongst designers and web developers. Under the auspices of the Sydney-based design and development house, Agency Rainford, I decided to experience the Jelly phenomenon for myself.

Why Jelly?

Regardless of whether the idea of spending the day amongst your fellow designers sounds like inspiration-heaven or an infinite string of distractions, Jellies have gained appeal for number of reasons:

• It’s a refreshing day out-of-the-office with like-minded individuals
• It’s a day in the office for freelancers, home-based designers and people who don’t work in a regular office environment
• It’s a great opportunity to mix and network, while actually getting some ‘real work’ done
• The coffee is consistently fabulous

For most designers, attending a Jelly is simply a unique way to get into a different headspace, share ideas and do it all amongst great company.

But… Do you actually get work done?

The amount of work that occurs at a Jelly is as much dependent on your personal working style, as that of your coworkers. One of Agency Rainford’s Jelly regulars reflected on how little work occurred at their first Jelly, citing that the pure excitement of launching one of Sydney’s first code-and-design Jellies, combined with sharing the space with a diverse, energized crowd, had a predictably negative effect on productivity. However, once a routine had been established, complete with recurring participants and standardized coffee breaks, the Jelly environment turned from novelty to one of constructive cooperation.

In attempting to commit to my regular day-to-day at the Jelly, I quickly discovered that I was only able to maintain concentration by leveling the surrounding conversations to ambient noise, no matter how interesting they were. Yes, there were silent stretches of 10-15 minutes, but the majority of the time the room was filled with fascinating chatter - often, directed at you. For designers used to operating in busy agencies, this may be no shock, but for the rest of us there were simply two options - either tune out and work, or sport a serious pair of headphones.

Another consideration soon arose. I was away from my desktop machine – and didn’t have access to my drives or the intranet. Although there was no critical need to access either resource, it did highlight that a degree of readiness is necessary, especially if you don’t regularly work away from the office.

After a hectic morning of people walking in and out with laptops, various introductions and a collective curiosity as to what everyone else was working on, things did settle into a steady hum. The conversation continued to ebb in and out for the rest of the day, but with more purpose and less YouTube breaks.

It is possible to get a solid day’s work done at a Jelly, but for most participants, that’s not entirely the point – just as important are the social and collaborative benefits, from brainstorming a new idea, learning how you can do something better, or simply meeting other designers.

So, how do I get started?

Interested in giving casual coworking a try? Jellies have spread to over 100 cities worldwide. Check the list of locations to find one near you.

I asked Tim Lucas, the organizer of Agency Rainford’s Jelly for his advice to those planning on starting their own Jelly. His response was to keep it simple, regular and genuine. If you limit the scope of your Jelly to a manageable number of participants and simple workspaces, maintain a regular Jelly schedule, mindful of meetings and other work commitments you have on, and foster a genuine sense of community, then your Jelly will soon populate and often, maintain itself. Read more on how to host your own Jelly.

Casual coworking may not be for everyone, but if you’re a designer who enjoys being able to work remotely and is open to spending a day collaboratively working, then there’s a good chance that you will be hooked. Personally, I found that not only was it a great way to meet a diverse and engaged group, but learn more about my craft and still get a satisfying amount of work done, too. After all, what’s not to love about Jelly?

Many thanks to our friends at Agency Rainford in Sydney, Australia. Follow them on Twitter.

Do you host, or are you planning on organizing or attending a Jelly? We support a number of events for designers and developers via our Giving Back program and are keen to get behind your Jelly or event, too.

We've just opened up three brand new positions in our Sydney office and wanted to share them here first. It doesn't seem long ago that 3 of us launched Campaign Monitor from a small office. Today there are 20 of us working hard across Australia, the US, Canada and Norway to build the best email marketing software out there for designers.

Before I dig into the details on the position, I wanted to share a little about what it's like working for Campaign Monitor.

We pride ourselves on building a pretty unique environment for our team to work in. While most tech companies go with the standard open plan office, our experience shows that the ability to cut out distractions is important. Instead, we provide large closable offices for our entire development team. You can read more about our thinking on this subject in this post from last year. We're currently in the process of tripling our current space, which will give us up to 40 offices, a huge lunch area and, most importantly, room for a second ping pong table and gaming area.

While we do our best to remove distractions, we also like to spend a good amount of time together every day. We all eat lunch together at the same table every day of the week. This has been an awesome way for the team to really get to know each other and have that social aspect without the constant interruptions you'd expect from open plan. Everyone's lunch is free, and fully catered from a local supplier (via our super cool lunch ordering system). We also get out of the office for a day every month for things like go karting, playing golf and surfing lessons.

Last year we were even lucky enough to be named the coolest company in Australia growing globally. Building software is serious business, but that sure as heck doesn't mean we can't have a little fun doing it.

Who we're looking for

Senior Designer

You might have noticed that we take serious pride in our pixels. We're looking for a senior designer to join our team and help create the best experiences possible for our customers. You'll be playing a big part in how our software works, and also get your feet wet across many other parts of the business. Whether it's working on a new design for our web site, designing a banner ad and landing page for a campaign we're running or coming up with t-shirt design ideas. Learn more and apply

Systems Engineer

As we continue to expand our infrastructure, we're after a seasoned Systems Engineer to help us manage this growth. You'll be responsible for keeping Campaign Monitor running smoothly and working with the rest of our operations team to ensure we continue to scale. You'll also be helping to monitor our deliverability across multiple data centers and respond to issues as they arise. Learn more and apply

QA Engineer

We're looking for a QA engineer who has substantial manual and automated testing experience and can code C# or Java without breaking a sweat. You'll be working closely with our development team to build on our existing suite of automated tests (WebAii) that run as part of our continuous integration build. Learn more and apply

I should also clarify that all three of these positions are in our Sydney office, which is not far from the beach and around 30 minutes south of the city centre.

In the interest of sharing more about the culture at Campaign Monitor, we plan on posting more behind the scenes stories about life in the office. If you follow the Freshview blog, you might have come across this post before, but it was too good not to share again. More stuff coming soon, including our popular ping pong ranking app.

For the last year and a half we've been providing free catered lunches for the Campaign Monitor team. We don't provide a certain type of meal in bulk, instead every team member can order whatever they feel like that day. As you can imagine, with 16 staff in our Sydney office, the logistics for this can get quite complex. I wanted to share our latest innovation in the all important lunch management.

As part of our annual internship program, an intern will often start working on an internal app to get familiar with our development environment, coding practices, etc. This year, star intern Andrew Canby was given the task of overhauling our current lunch ordering system. This is no easy task either, hell hath no fury like 16 hungry nerds so bugs or downtime aren't an option!

Andrew came up with some great innovations. I'm fairly confident this is the sweetest lunch ordering system on the planet. Here's a screenshot of the finished product right after I just submitted my order.

Like the other internal apps we use, the lunch ordering system is only a click away from any page on our Intranet.

The ping pong application was the brainchild of our other intern Pete, and I'll be sharing the details of that one in an upcoming post.

Inspiring your stomach

The hardest part about lunch each day is deciding what you feel like eating. Sometimes you have the perfect meal in your head, but other days your stomach isn't dropping any hints. To give you some ideas, the app shows you exactly what everyone else in the team has ordered today. With a single click, you can copy their order, make any tweaks and order away. Here's Ben's latest order history. I chose him because he's probably the healthiest eater in the office.

As well as checking out what others are eating today, you can look at their entire order history. Maybe you liked the look of that lamb wrap Jason was eating on Friday. Two clicks and the same wrap will be ready for you by lunch time.

Brainstorm with the tag cloud

I was a little skeptical about this idea at first, but it's been extremely handy. There's a small tag cloud showing the most popular items ordered by the team to date. Here's a sample of what's been popular of late. Aren't we a healthy bunch!

By clicking on any of the words, we'll show a range of popular orders that item has been included in. Say you feel like something with chicken in it. Click on that word and the following suggestions are displayed.

Click on the meal that looks best, customize it any way you like and your order is done.

Suggest as you type

If you don't want to rely on others for inspiration, you can just start typing your order. Almost instantly, similar options around the items you've entered will be suggested. You might enter turkey and avocado and be presented with the most popular orders to date that have included both of these ingredients. Very cool.

Processing the orders

The daily order cut-off is 11am, and if you haven't submitted an order by 10am, you'll get a reminder email just in case. After the cut-off, the days orders are written to a static HTML page which is then automatically faxed to the local caterer.

The caterer prepares all the meals fresh and then hand delivers them individually wrapped with that team members name on it at 12.30 each day. The whole thing runs like clockwork, so a big thanks to Andrew for a job well done.

When we moved Campaign Monitor into a much larger space at the end of 2006, we figured we had enough room to get us to the end of our 3 year lease. There were only 3 of us at the time, so 160 square meters (that’s about 525 square feet) seemed like it would do the trick even if we added a few more people to the team. While our customer base was growing very quickly, we were big fans of scaling our software without necessarily having to scale our team with it.

Starting open plan

We went for an open plan layout in the office for a couple of reasons. The first being that it’s by far the easiest and most cost effective way to lay out an office. Secondly, with only 3 of us in all that space there weren’t a whole lot of distractions and it allowed us to communicate very easily. Basically, it worked.

Over the next 6 months or so we were lucky enough to double our customer base, revenues and inevitably, our team size. Before too long we added another 4 great people to the team, not to mention an extremely popular (and recently upgraded) ping pong table. We still had plenty of room, but one thing soon became clear. Open plan offices don’t scale well for software developers.

Getting into the zone

You see, software development is a little different to most other jobs. To be truly productive, developers need time to really “get in the zone”. To get their best work done, they need to phase out all the other distractions around them and be genuinely focused on the task at hand. This is when the really good stuff happens. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that can be switched on or off instantly, it takes focus and time (from a few minutes to half an hour). As you can imagine, a ping pong ball to the forehead can be quite the flow killer. Over time, lots of these small distractions can prevent smart people from getting things done and generally piss them off at the same time.

This isn’t just something we’ve learned from experience either. Peopleware, a must-read for any software developer (and especially their managers) devotes an entire section to the importance of removing distractions from the office environment. Joel Spolsky’s famous Joel Test dedicates number 8 out of 12 to making sure your programmers have quiet working conditions and 37signals have long advocated the importance of alone time.

Of course, not everybody feels the same way about open plan, which is clearly why so many software companies still use that format. We had our doubts about the open plan approach working long term, and so we decided to look for some alternate space that would allow us to create an environment perfect for keeping our growing team happy and productivity high.

Time to move… again

Eventually we settled on some recently vacated space a few levels above us in the same building. It was double the size of our current office and gave us a blank slate to plan our dream setup. Similar to the approach Fog Creek took in their planning, we put together a wish list and then approached a number of architects to make it a reality.

Above all else, the priority was for closed offices for all our developers, a nice big area where people can relax and take a break, and a communal eating area where we could all have lunch together. Oh, and it needed to scale to support 20 staff members, we didn’t want to move again in a hurry.

Closed offices and catered lunches

Working with the talented team at Watershed Design, we eventually had a layout that would give us closed offices for 8 developers and very large, private workstations for 11 other team members who aren’t writing code. We used loads of glass and timber to keep as much natural light flowing through each office. We also ended up with a large breakout area for relaxing and working on your ping pong game. To make everything feel as open as possible, we also cut out a big chunk of the roof and added some cool lighting.

Here are a few photos of the finished product, which you can click for a larger version.

Big closed offices for our developers, most with a nice outlook over the park

A sweet entrance and reception area

Our 2 meeting tables

Funky closed offices and over-sized workstations

One of our biggest concerns about moving from open plan to closed offices was killing the awesome vibe we have around the office. The entire team get along extremely well and while the older layout was occasionally distracting, it was also plenty of fun. To alleviate this, we’ve since introduced free fully-catered lunches for the team. We now eat together every single day, which has made a huge difference and is something I wish we introduced a long time ago. It’s also a fantastic way for newer team members to get to know their workmates in a very informal setting (not that it ever gets formal around here anyway).

Now that everyone has a closable door you don’t need to tippy toe around the rest of the office, but can chat to other members of the team knowing you’re not distracting anyone else. If the door’s shut, come back another time or send them an IM or email. No more flow breaking or ping pong head shots.

Was it worth it?

From start to finish, the fitout took about 4 months to complete and we couldn’t be happier with the result. We moved in mid November 2007 and have already measured a tidy improvement in the amount we’re all getting done. Even more importantly, after a casual survey of the team while writing this article, every staff member prefers the new closed office environment over open plan.

Going closed office might not be the cheapest or most intuitive option, but given the increase in productivity and positive feedback from the team, I can’t recommend it enough for small, growing software teams.