OmbuLabs Blog

At OmbuLabs, we love remote work. While other companies are asking employees to come back into the office, we are continuing to lean into the remote-first work culture that we had even before the pandemic. In this article, I will discuss the reasons why remote work is essential to the culture of our company. I will then outline how we create a culture that is both remote-friendly and productive.

Just before the world shut down in 2020, the team at OmbuLabs participated in an in-person retreat in Punta Cana. It was a wonderful experience, and the team was eager to have another retreat in 2021. We even began planning one, but with the safety of team members at risk because of the pandemic and the difficulty of traveling it soon became obvious that an in-person retreat would not be possible. Therefore we turned our attention to having the retreat virtually.

This ended up being a very successful event, and we wanted to share the experience and strategies that we used to plan and execute this retreat which took place virtually over four days towards the end of 2021.

I joined OmbuLabs as a Senior Software Engineer on February 11, which was a Friday-more on this later! Tomorrow I will have completed 2 weeks here. So if you want to find out about the onboarding process at OmbuLabs, read on.

OmbuLabs is a fully remote company based out of Philadelphia with team members in many countries. Currently we are growing pretty steadily, and we thought it would be a good idea to let prospective employees know what it would be like to work at OmbuLabs.

This article is based on questions we often get during interviews, so we hope it helps if you are thinking about applying to OmbuLabs. You can learn more about the recruitment process here.

One of the main goals we set for 2021 is to become more efficient as an agile team. And one of the challenges we addressed was how to minimize the decision-making bottleneck. To confront that we decided to take some actions that I’m listing below.

As a software consulting company, we bill for the time we work on client projects. So it is vital for us to keep track of the time we put into every task. We’ve had some trouble over the years with our time tracking, and sometimes that led us to work more time than what we finally billed for. We would like to share some of the experience we have collected over the years and the tools that we currently use.

At OmbuLabs we use Tettra to power our knowledge base. As a remote, distributed team it is very important to us to have our content structured and organized. We follow some good practices to keep it organized and up to date, which we describe here, and we use Tettra to keep our knowledge organized and integrated with the tools we use on a daily basis.

As a distributed, remote team we use different tools to communicate at OmbuLabs, like Slack and Zoom. Those are great for live communication. But every company has information that needs to be kept and stored somewhere. In our case, we started off using the GitHub Wiki and Google Docs. However, documentation and policies need to be maintained, updated and checked regularly. And having information scattered in different tools, formats and accounts became a hassle.

That’s where a knowledge base comes in. At OmbuLabs we use Tettra and we will share our experience in a different article. But regardless of what tool you choose, here are some practices that will help you keep your knowledge base organized and updated.

Becoming the Apprentice, and then Junior Developer at OmbuLabs was both exciting and nerve racking. Learning a new company can be challenging, especially when the skills are new and the work is remote.

Fortunately OmbuLabs made the journey a smooth and easy process. Here are some of the things that have been working.

Remote work is a growing reality. In the 21st century, we have distributed companies that work 100% remotely, with team members scattered around the world.

While remote work has its benefits - diversity in background and experiences, access to an immense talent pool, cut down office costs to name a few - it also brings its challenges. And the biggest one is communication.

There are several pieces of software that aim to facilitate communication in a remote work environment. At OmbuLabs, we use Slack for our day-to-day conversations and Zoom for our calls. However, as a remote team, we don’t get to meet our teammates face to face. We don’t have “water cooler” chats or as many opportunities for casual chats as an office environment.

So how can we bring our team closer together? How can we build that team spirit that comes from seeing everyone and talking about our casual, social lives? Well, last month we had a team retreat. And it was great.

We have been a fully remote company for a year and a half now. Making the transition to being fully remote can be challenging for any team. During the past year and a half we have worked on making sure that our team is as productive, communicative and social as it was when we had a traditional office space. Here are some tips that we have found to be useful for remote teams: