It’s been nearly two years now since we opened the doors here at BraveNewCode. Back then, I was working out in Vancouver at a software engineering job I didn’t really like. Dale and I had been working together on Matthew Good’s website off and on for a few months, and found that we complimented each other’s skill sets quite well. When opportunity came knocking, Dale and I decided to grab onto it, eventually incorporating BraveNewCode and doing our first few websites. When business started rolling in, I put in my notice in Vancouver, moved back home to a little farming town in British Columbia, and the rest is history.

The hardest part about working together is the time zone difference between Dale and myself: I live out in British Columbia and Dale lives in Hamilton, Ontario. When I wake up in the morning, usually around 8am or so, Dale’s already been up and at ‘em for a few hours. Depending on what we have on our plate, Dale and I usually try and do an early morning call to sync up. If Dale hits me before I’ve had a coffee (or even a decaffeinated placebo), sometimes I’m sure I sound a little grumpy. But to his credit, Dale just pretends like I’m not.

Depending on how much food and drink I have in my apartment, I’ll sometimes work at home, or often I’ll head out to a coffee shop. When at home, I generally avoid my home office (I’ve never really been able to make it feel comfy), and usually find myself working on the dining room table. In the evenings I’ll often flip on the gas fireplace, plant my butt down on the couch, and code from there. While I have an iMac in my office, 90% of the work I do these days uses my Macbook Pro.

I go through cycles typically, usually a phase of quoting projects, followed by a phase of actively working on projects. Dale handles the majority of web design, and I handle the majority of web development. Over the years we have both rubbed off on each other, and I sometimes find myself doing a bit of design (at least from a CSS level), while Dale occasionally writes PHP and Javascript.

We generally receive between five and ten project inquiries every week via our quotation form, and due to our size and our availability, generally only can take on about one project a month. If you do the math, that means we unfortunately have to turn a lot of projects down. Some people would immediately say we should ramp up the business and hire more people, but Dale and I are both inclined to keep it small and personal, opting instead to focus on our existing clients and the projects we’re passionate about.

We both have cell phone plans that let us talk to each other whenever we want for free – given that we’re 4,500 kms apart, that’s a pretty nice feature to have. When we’re working on projects that involve the both of us, often we’ll fire up an audio chat with iChat and communicate that way. There was a period of time there when my internet at home was pretty dismal, and we sort of abandoned iChat for a while. But it seems to have been fixed, so I imagine we’ll pick that up again.

I have quite a few IM accounts, but whenever I’m working I tend to use my top secret mobile .me account which essentially only has Dale as an iChat contact. I found that people used to interrupt me all the time on my other accounts, so I decided not to use them. Tim Ferris, author of the Four Hour Work Week, isn’t a big fan of IM, and neither am I. I’ve found in a lot of big corporate jobs that people just shuffle virtual paperwork around via IM, simply passing the buck for all their problems. When I gave up IM at my last job during the day, I found that a lot of problems that people used to try to get me to solve were eventually solved on their own when I wasn’t immediately available. I look at that as a win-win. So I only have a chat program with Dale on it these days for when we’re working.

While we sometimes work late hours or weekends, for the most part Dale and I try to stick to a regular schedule. I spent most of my 20s working 60 hour work weeks, and the lack of a personal life is not only unhealthy, but generally makes one really miserable. So Dale and I work pretty hard to maintain a good balance. To that end, we are both big fans of automation and constantly try to remove inefficient processes from the company.

For example, a lot of the content on this site gets updated automatically. On the WPtouch page, all the plugin information gets updated the moment we push a new release to the WordPress repository. Even though that system is entirely managed using Subversion on WordPress.org, the data gets pulled into this site periodically which ultimately minimizes the amount of time we have to spend updating our site manually. That’s a philosophy we’ve carried over to all our client projects as well, and we routinely go out of our way to automate some aspects of content generation for them as well.

When I’m not pounding the keys and creating code, there’s a little lake near me that I usually disappear to. In the summer I usually end up camping there, and in the winter I often go up just for a stroll to clear my mind.

Dale’s passion outside of BraveNewCode is bass fishing, and he spends a lot of his downtime in the summer pitting himself against a legion of fish.

For the most part, the physical separation between Dale and I is hardly noticed in a normal work day. Even so, we do our best to meet up every few months, if for nothing other than a few pints. I was out in Hamilton, Ontario last month for Dale’s birthday, and Dale will be out to British Columbia in June for WordCamp Vancouver. If the weather starts turning for the worse, Dale and I will sometimes meet somewhere warm for a week of R & R and brainstorming, usually without much computer time. Last year we spent a week in Cancun and two weeks in Punta Cana, which is where we did most of the initial brainstorming around the soon to be released 2.0 version of WPtouch.

For the last few months, Dale and I have been busy designing and coding the next generation of our WPtouch mobile plugin. The new version is a 100% rewrite, complete with a framework which will allow people to build out mobiles themes. I think when it’s released most people will be extremely happy with the flexibility and ease of use of the new version. If you’re interested in WPtouch 2.0 Pro, make sure you sign up for notifications at WPtouch.com. We’ll also be occasionally updating people via our Twitter stream. If you like snappy one-liners, check out my Twitter stream or Dale’s stream.

And on that note, it’s back to PHP land for me. Next update from me will probably be around the time WPtouch 2.0 Pro is released. Until then.