For those of you that don't know. I took a job at Koders, Inc. The adventure with my step-father, VyMed Data Services, do not work out as I hoped, but I feel like I am in a better place now.

Koders was started by a fraternity brother of mine at Georgia Tech. He started it around 2 years ago, and we are having some great success now as a company, too early to talk about some of them now, but hopefully I will be able to point you to some press releases soon.

But I wanted to talk about the basics of what you need to work from home, aka telecommute. Our team consists of people in Santa Monica, CA, one person in San Francisco, CA, a few developers in St Petersberg, Russia, and myself in Jacksonville, FL. So how do we keep up the communication while keeping the costs down?

Answer: Skype and GoToMeeting.

Skype is a free IP based service that lets you call other Skype users as well as other land based phones. We sometimes hold sales calls with skype. It also supports video calls, so I am virtually in the room with the other developers most of the day, because they have a dedicated computer setup to host a "Max Headroom" version of myself.

And then when it comes to do paired programming or when I need help, I simple create a GoToMeeting session and share my screen so that others can view it while we talk about thing over Skype. I can also give them control over my computer so that they can control my keyboard and mouse from their computer.

The total cost of this setup for a year is $39 a month.