Tour of our new office
July 12, 2007 by Dmitry
Recently we moved out of the kitchen-based office in my apartment to a new dedicated office. Here’s a short tour.
First of all, this is our… hm… mascot — a toilet paper dispenser robot:

Vladimir bought it in Taiwan.
We have two rooms. One of them has a large desk and two chairs (all from IKEA, super simple, and super cheap). We found that, unlike what Joel Spolsky says about private offices for programmers, we are more motivated and productive when we write code together, even though each of us works on completely different products.

Here we have an Asus wifi router and a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive connected to it for wireless backups.

The second room is kitchen/relaxing room.
Today we bought a coffee machine and a pot. Before that we drank only beer. Now we can drink coffee and tea! Healthy life, hooray!

I just said healthy life? How about a hooka in the center of the room? Here we lie on a carpet, smoking, and brainstorming ideas (that’s a buzzword for “talking about stupid things”.)

Back to the first room — here we have a tool for fixing things the Russian way (if something doesn’t work, hit it), a hammer:

That’s all for now.
Oh, I forgot these cute cats!

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Looks good! I am jealous - still working out of the apartment here :)
The funny thing is your new office still looks very house-like. I don’t know if that’s because of the brilliant decorating job, or because it is in fact part of a house!
Yeah, it actually was an apartment in its previous life :)
У меня такая же кофеварка и чайник, ха.
Egor: ты тоже зашел в Эльдорадо и купил все самое дешевое? :))
А у меня такой же модем Асус и почти такой же макентош)
Come on guys, write in English :)
Хех, у тя тож есть MyBook, а чё лампочка синяя, у меня вот зелёная(я про тот круг который светится) :)
I’m also more productive when writing code together with my team. But keep the balance, in some companies open spaces too lage (around 20-30 people in one big room) and it’s very inconvenient.
PS: Nice cats : )
Ildar: The light is blue because this is a Premium Edition, with Firewire port. Also, this circle is a free disk space indicator, though it works only on Windows and Mac OS X, but our router runs on Linux.
Anton: right, 20-30 people is too much for one room.
Ща выпендрюсь и тож скажу по-английски:
Cool )))
Congrats! Getting an office is fun and exciting. Hope you don’t pay too much, it’s usually a problem in Russia.
Vitaly: In Dolgoprudny it’s nearly impossible to find one.
I’m a strong believer in pair programming, or, at very least, in open-plan office. Sharing ideas with your team mates is so much more cooler than sitting in an isolated office Spolsky-style.