Every week, we share the story of an inspiring Remote Worker and Remotive reader, here's Coby's story:

1.- Can you please tell us a bit more about: Who are you, and what do you do? :)

I’m a product designer at GitHub, working remotely from my home in County Down, Northern Ireland. Before moving to the UK, I also worked remotely from Australia too (although I’m originally from NZ), and did freelance and consulting work for ~8 years before that.

I’ve been working on product at GitHub for a little over two and a half years now, and the size of our team has tripled in that time, which has been a really interesting journey as a highly distributed company (~60% of GitHub employees work remotely).

2.- Why do you work remotely, and how does it feel?

The most important benefit of working remotely for me is the flexibility—being able to choose where in the world I want to live (say what you want about the UK weather, but the Irish countryside is a beautiful place to live), and not having to factor in distance to an office or a commute into the equation. That, and the ability to spend more time being present with family and loved ones is priceless.

How does it feel? For the most part, fantastic. Especially with an employer who is genuinely committed to making remote work a first-class experience. There are always times when you feel frustrated, disconnected, and out of the loop, however working remotely is still such a new concept in our society that it’s only going to improve with time. The future is bright!

3.- What software do you use?

Most of my work happens directly in pull requests on GitHub. For design, I work predominantly in the browser, so it’s very rare I’ll use visual design tools as part of my workflow. I code in Atom, the open source text editor we released in February last year, and make extensive use of Chrome’s DevTools.

As a remote worker, written communication is a huge part of my day, so I do most of my writing (including composing comments and emails) using iA Writer by Information Architects. For productivity, I’ve tried almost every task list application and framework under the sun, I seem to have settled on Trello for keeping track of what’s in play.

Other tools that I’d recommend are f.lux, Screenhero, Glui, GIF Brewery, and Duet Display.

4.- What would be your dream setup?

I’d love the display from the new 5K iMac as an external monitor, but that seems like it’s a still while away yet. I’d also love to get onto a faster internet connection—fibre broadband is still being rolled out in NI and isn’t available where I live yet.

On the plus side, I get to dogfood using GitHub on bad connections, so I’m constantly reminded of how important performance is to user experience.

Thanks Coby! You can find him on Twitter over here :)

Would like to start a conversation about sharing your story? Let us know over here- thanks :)

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