July and August of 2013 will be a mark in the Plataformatec history as the time when we moved out from our green house in the Vila Madalena neighbourhood to a brand new office in the region of the Paulista Avenue.

The brand new Plataformatec HQ 2.0

Our company has grown a lot in this year (we are about to pass the number of 20 developers in our team, can you believe it?) and our office wasn’t enough to accommodate the entire company anymore. So we have been out in the city looking for a new house for us. We took our time to pick a new place for us to call of ‘Headquarters’, that wasn’t an easy task to do. We chose a beautiful and charming antique house, but since it is almost 100 years old, it needed to go through a lot of repairs and improvements to accommodate the Plataformatec team.

So, while we are in between places, some of our teams are working remotely across different places in the city as we wait for our new office to be ready. But thanks to our heavy usage of asynchronous communication channels our productivity looks the same as before. We use tools like Basecamp, GitHub, Skype and Campfire to get our things done and talk about our projects – from like code reviews to scope related discussions and everything else – without getting in the way of anyone who might be busy with something else, so when we end up working apart it isn’t such a big deal since we are used to communicate and work in some sort of remote way.

But while some developers would jump out of happiness for the chance of working from homes, I miss that good old office that I used to commute to everyday, because I don’t go to work to work.

In all these months at Plataformatec the office has proven to be much more than a place to write code and do our work. It became a place to share our stories, to improve our craft, to build our projects together and to have fun with our friends. So working from home without the whole “HQ Experience” isn’t quite the same thing for me and some of the others members of our team.

Our first tour in the new Headquarters

All of the effort we have put into developing and maintaining our culture and values has reflected in a work environment completely different from any average consulting office, and as the company grows and we improve our values we hold the responsibility to keep improving our HQ for everyone who is or will be part of the company.

We couldn’t be more thrilled about this. I would like to thank everyone who have been cheering and following our work, and we would love to share our excitement with this new chapter in the history of Plataformatec. Be sure that we are going to post and tweet a truckload of pictures and videos as we move in to our new HQ. Let these new chapter be as great as our history have been.