A decade of remote from Sarajevo

For years now I've worked for a San Francisco startup from Sarajevo, Bosnia. When people hear this, they assume the timezone is the hard part.

The timezone is the best part.

The shape of the day

Sarajevo is GMT+1, nine hours ahead of San Francisco. My morning is their night. Until mid-afternoon my time, nobody in California is awake to ping me.

That's four or five hours of silence, every day, built into the geography. No standups, no "quick question," no meeting that could have been an email — the people who would call it are asleep. I do my hardest work in that window, the kind that needs forty uninterrupted minutes just to load the problem into my head.

Then SF wakes up and my late afternoon becomes overlap: standups, pairing, the few decisions that genuinely need voices. When I log off in the evening, they still have most of a workday to run with whatever I handed over.

Build while they sleep, sync while they work. I'd love to take credit for the design, but it's just the map.

Decisions live in documents

The timezone enforces the habit that makes any of this work: writing things down.

If a decision happens only in a meeting, then for everyone who wasn't in the room it didn't happen. So the default is async. Proposals are documents. Discussions are comment threads. If something matters, it has a URL, and the reasoning stays attached to the conclusion.

This feels slower than grabbing someone at a desk. It's faster over any horizon longer than a week, because nobody has to reconstruct why we did something from memory and vibes.

The other half is guarding maker time like a production system. My morning block is booked, it doesn't move, and it can't become a call. An empty calendar before 3pm looks lazy. It's the most productive thing I own.

A plane ticket is not a commute

I fly to the Berlin or San Francisco office a few times a year. Not because the work requires it — the work ships fine — but because trust compounds faster in person.

One week of whiteboards and dinners buys months of smoother async. Once you've argued about architecture over food, a terse Slack message reads as terse, not hostile. In-person time is concentrated relationship fuel. You don't need much. You do need some.

And the bigger point, the one people keep missing: none of this required moving. I started on a Pentium 4 in Sarajevo, installing games from floppy disks, then poking at PHP. There was no scene here. There was a machine and there was time. Today, code written in the same city runs in front of millions of readers. I don't think I'm the exception — I think the pipeline finally works. The distance between a kid with a computer and real engineering work is mostly bandwidth and one company willing to hire on output.

What helps in practice:

• End every day with a written handoff: what changed, what's blocked, what I need by my morning.
• Default to documents; escalate to a call only when the thread stalls.
• Keep the camera on during overlap hours. When you're rarely a body, being a face matters.
• Protect the morning. Everything else can move.

The honest costs, so this doesn't read like a brochure: some calls land at 8 or 9pm, and dinner loses. Occasionally a decision happens in a hallway and reaches me a day late — a good team catches it fast, but it happens. And twice a year I'm jet-lagged in two countries at once.

None of it outweighs the mornings.

A decade in, the hardest part of working remotely is explaining why it isn't hard.