james snell and sam ruby, both ibm employees working from home, wrote recently about lessons learned from that situation. my trip to finland and sweden was entirely so i could meet up with my manager (in finland), one of the people who reports to me (who lives in estonia and came up to finland to meet), another person who might start reporting to me (who lives in northern sweden and came down to uppsala to meet), and most of the senior management of the company (in finland and sweden). now the only person i work with directly who i haven't met in person lives in ukraine.

(oh, and for those that haven't figured it out or been told already, i'm now working for mysql ab. my title is lead web programmer. of course, everything i do and say here is still all my own fault.)