I am happy to say the v1.0 of my Slack app, Visual Office, is ready today! https://www.visualoffice.app/

My obsession with extending an office metaphor into Slack started last year, when I was managing a remote team of engineers at a company that is 75% remote. Despite loving my work from home days, I couldn't help but notice that I was closer to my co-workers I saw in person than the ones I interacted with remotely.

For the most part this was minor, but important, interactions. The banter when we first came into the office, lunches taken together more often, and a general awareness of what they were focused on. On the other hand, it was harder to setup social time with my remote teammates (I didn't want to ping and interrupt them) and the context I had about what they were currently working on was often based on signals that got piped into slack in the form of jira, zendesk, or sales bot messages. Not an ideal way to build a relationship, especially outside my immediate team.

Visual Office is my attempt at solving these issues by making it easy to understand what your teammates are doing and how they are feeling.

- A pixel art representation of your office inside Slack. - Async, daily standups to provide context within and across teams. - Ephemeral social rooms in your virtual office, so you can join a team lunch, or quick break, without needing to be in always on channels. - A single screen to update your status, emotional state, and turn on your do not disturb settings. - Developed as a Slack app to ensure you don't need to change how your remote company already communicates.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!