Closer to the Ground: How I Changed Coworking to a Village House
From the editorial board of the blog: many probably remember the story about the village of programmers in the Kirov region - the initiative of the ex-developer from Yandex impressed many. And our developer decided to create his own settlement in a fraternal country. We give him the floor.
Hi, my name is Georgy Novik, I work as a backend developer at Skyeng. I mainly sell Wishlist operators, managers and other interested parties in relation to our big CRM, and also connect all sorts of newfangled things for customer service - bots for technical support, automatic dialer services, etc.
Like many developers, I am not attached to the office. What does a person who is not required to travel to the office daily do? One will go live in Bali. Another settles in coworking or on his own couch. I chose a completely different direction and moved to a farm in the Belarusian forests. And now from me to the nearest decent coworking 130 kilometers.
Actually, I myself am a village lad: I was born and grew up in a village, I seriously studied physics from school - well, I entered the physics and technology department in Grodno. Programmed for pleasure in JavaScript, then under win32, then in PHP.
I am from the institute - at the center
At one point, he even abandoned everything, returned to teach horseback riding and to go hiking in the village. But then he decided to get a diploma and went to the city again. At the same time I came to the ScienceSoft office, where they offered me 10 times more than I earned on my trips.
For a year or two, I realized that a big city, a rented apartment and food from a supermarket are not mine. The day is scheduled in minutes, there is no flexibility, especially if you go to the office. And man is an owner by nature. We, in Belarus, and even in Russia, constantly have some kind of initiative when people leave for the village and organize eco-settlements. And this is not a whim. This is rationalization.
And this is me today
In general, everything came together. My wife dreamed of having her horse, I dreamed of moving somewhere far away from the metropolis - we set a goal to raise money for cars and construction, and at the same time began to look for a place and like-minded people.
We wanted our future village house to stand in the forest, and next to it were several free hectares for grazing horses. Also needed plots for future neighbors. Plus, the condition is land away from major routes and other technological factors. Finding a place that corresponded to them was difficult. It was not one, then the other, then ecology was a disaster, then land registration: many villages are slowly becoming empty, and local authorities are transferring settlement lands to other legal forms that make them inaccessible to ordinary people.
As a result, having spent several years searching, we came across an advertisement for the sale of a house in eastern Belarus and realized that this was a chance. The small village of Ulesye, two hours away from Minsk, like many others, was at the extinction stage.
The first time we arrived in Ulesye was in February. Silence, snow ...
Nearby is a frozen lake. Around for many kilometers of forest, and next to the village overgrown with weeds. You can’t imagine any better. We met an elderly neighbor, talked about our plans, and he assured us that the place is excellent and we will fit in normally.
This is how our village looks in a warmer time
We purchased a plot of land with an old house - the house was small, but bribed the size of the logs of the log house. At first, I just wanted to remove the paint from them and make cosmetic repairs, but I got carried away and took apart almost the whole house.
Our house: log, jute tow and clay
And a few months after the registration of all this stuff into the property, we loaded the belongings and the cat into the car, and we moved. True, the first months I had to live in a tent, set up directly in the house - to fence off the repair. And soon I bought five horses and built a stable, as my wife and I dreamed. Huge money was not required for this - the village is far from the city: financially, and even bureaucratically, everything is simpler.
Ideally, I wake up at 5-6 in the morning, work at my computer for about four hours, and then go to work with horses or drive around with construction. But in the summer, sometimes I prefer to work during the day, in the sunshine, and leave morning and evening for household affairs.
In the summer I like to work in the yard
Since I work in a distributed team, the first thing I did was screw a huge satellite dish for the Internet onto the roof. So in the place where it was possible to catch GPRS / EDGE from the phone, I received the necessary 3-4 Mbit / s for reception and about 1 Mbit / s for transmission. This pull was enough to call the team and I was worried that long pings would be a problem in work.
Thanks to this design, we have a stable internet
Having studied the topic a bit, I decided to use a mirror to amplify the signal. Some put 3G modems in the focus of the mirror, but this is not a very reliable option, so I found a specially made irradiator for the satellite dish, operating in the 3G range. They do such things in Yekaterinburg, I had to tinker with delivery, but it was worth it. The speed rose by 25 percent and reached the ceiling of the cell equipment, but the connection became stable and ceased to depend on the weather. Later, I set up the Internet for some friends in different parts of the country - and it seems that with a mirror you can catch it almost everywhere.
And two years later, Velcom upgraded the equipment of the cell to DC-HSPA + - this is the communication standard that precedes LTE. Under good conditions, it gives us 30 Mbps for reception and 4 for transmission. She presses nothing more in terms of work and heavy media content is downloaded in minutes.
My attic office
And I equipped my main workplace with an office in a separate room in the attic. There it is much easier to concentrate on tasks, nothing around is distracting.
A new router out of the box covers about half a hectare around the house, so in the mood I can work on the street under a canopy, and go somewhere in nature. It’s convenient: if I’m busy in the stable or at construction sites, I’m still connected, the phone is in my pocket, the Internet is reachable.
There are locals in our village, but my wife and I wanted to find a company of people of our circle, like-minded people. Therefore, we announced ourselves - placed an ad in the catalog of eco-settlements. Thus began our eco-village "Ulyosye".
The first neighbors appeared a year later, and now five families with children live here.
Basically, we are joined by people who have some kind of business in a big city. I am the only one who works remotely. The whole community is still at the stage of arrangement, but everyone already has some ideas for developing the village. We are not summer residents. For example, we produce our products - pick berries, dry mushrooms.
There is a forest from all sides, wild berries, all kinds of herbs like ivan tea. And we decided that it would be rational to arrange their processing. So far, we are doing all this for ourselves. But in the near future we plan to build a dryer and harvest it all on an industrial scale in order to sell it to health food stores in the city.
This we dry strawberries for the winter. While in a small home dryer
Although we live far from large cities, we are not isolated. In Belarus, medicine, a car shop, post office and police are available anywhere.
We produce a part of “household chemicals” ourselves - for example, the wife learned how to make tooth powder with local herbs
As a child, I had everything that the city kids lacked - horseback riding, hiking and spending the night in the forest. As I grew older, I thought more and more that it was to this background that I owed all the good that was in me. And I wanted to do something similar for modern kids. Therefore, we decided to organize a summer children's camp with an equestrian section.
This summer we spent the first shift:
Trained the guys in horse riding
Learned to care for horses and harness
Engaged in all sorts of creativity in the fresh air - sculpted from clay, wove from a vine and so on
And also went hiking. Not far from Ulesya, the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve is located and we took our guests there on an excursion.
Everything was very homely: we cooked for the children ourselves, looked after them all together, every evening the whole company gathered at one table.
I hope this story becomes systemic, and we will arrange such shifts or sections all the time.
I have a very good salary, even for Minsk. And even more so for the farm, where for 100 kilometers in any direction there are forests. We don’t go to restaurants, we provide ourselves with products for 40%, so the money goes mainly for construction.
For example, we regularly invest in the purchase of equipment and materials
Since everything is being built, we have a bank of time - we can get together and help a neighbor all day, and then I will ask him - and he will help me all day. The technique can also be general: we recently met with the local priest, he even lent us a tractor.
The same tractor "from the priest"
We are also engaged in social initiatives all together: when they made the summer camp, the whole village was equipped with infrastructure.
That's how they prepared the room for the summer camp
Earlier, a garden was planted together - several hundred trees. When they begin to bear fruit, the harvest will also be common.
Life hack: planted gooseberry bushes around the apple tree. It is noted that hares bypass such landings.
For locals, we, of course, are freaks - but they treat us normally, and we help them to earn extra money - extra hands are often required. This summer, for example, hay for horses was harvested with them. A lot of village responded.
I want to warn you right away - crises in relationships are very possible. In the city, you went to the offices in the morning and met only in the evening. You can hide from any roughness - go to work, to restaurants, clubs, or guests. Everyone has their own affairs. There is no such thing here, you are constantly together, you have to learn to cooperate at a completely different level. It’s like a test - if you can’t spend time with a person 24/7, then you probably need to look for another person.
Something like that
ps There is no more land left in our village, so we gradually began to “colonize” the neighboring one –– there already three families are developing the land. And I want new people to come to us. If interested, then we have a VKontakte group .
Or just come to visit - I will teach you how to ride a horse.
Hi, my name is Georgy Novik, I work as a backend developer at Skyeng. I mainly sell Wishlist operators, managers and other interested parties in relation to our big CRM, and also connect all sorts of newfangled things for customer service - bots for technical support, automatic dialer services, etc.
Like many developers, I am not attached to the office. What does a person who is not required to travel to the office daily do? One will go live in Bali. Another settles in coworking or on his own couch. I chose a completely different direction and moved to a farm in the Belarusian forests. And now from me to the nearest decent coworking 130 kilometers.
What did I forget in the village?
Actually, I myself am a village lad: I was born and grew up in a village, I seriously studied physics from school - well, I entered the physics and technology department in Grodno. Programmed for pleasure in JavaScript, then under win32, then in PHP.
I am from the institute - at the center
At one point, he even abandoned everything, returned to teach horseback riding and to go hiking in the village. But then he decided to get a diploma and went to the city again. At the same time I came to the ScienceSoft office, where they offered me 10 times more than I earned on my trips.
For a year or two, I realized that a big city, a rented apartment and food from a supermarket are not mine. The day is scheduled in minutes, there is no flexibility, especially if you go to the office. And man is an owner by nature. We, in Belarus, and even in Russia, constantly have some kind of initiative when people leave for the village and organize eco-settlements. And this is not a whim. This is rationalization.
And this is me today
In general, everything came together. My wife dreamed of having her horse, I dreamed of moving somewhere far away from the metropolis - we set a goal to raise money for cars and construction, and at the same time began to look for a place and like-minded people.
How we looked for a place to move
We wanted our future village house to stand in the forest, and next to it were several free hectares for grazing horses. Also needed plots for future neighbors. Plus, the condition is land away from major routes and other technological factors. Finding a place that corresponded to them was difficult. It was not one, then the other, then ecology was a disaster, then land registration: many villages are slowly becoming empty, and local authorities are transferring settlement lands to other legal forms that make them inaccessible to ordinary people.
As a result, having spent several years searching, we came across an advertisement for the sale of a house in eastern Belarus and realized that this was a chance. The small village of Ulesye, two hours away from Minsk, like many others, was at the extinction stage.
The first time we arrived in Ulesye was in February. Silence, snow ...
Nearby is a frozen lake. Around for many kilometers of forest, and next to the village overgrown with weeds. You can’t imagine any better. We met an elderly neighbor, talked about our plans, and he assured us that the place is excellent and we will fit in normally.
This is how our village looks in a warmer time
We purchased a plot of land with an old house - the house was small, but bribed the size of the logs of the log house. At first, I just wanted to remove the paint from them and make cosmetic repairs, but I got carried away and took apart almost the whole house.
Our house: log, jute tow and clay
And a few months after the registration of all this stuff into the property, we loaded the belongings and the cat into the car, and we moved. True, the first months I had to live in a tent, set up directly in the house - to fence off the repair. And soon I bought five horses and built a stable, as my wife and I dreamed. Huge money was not required for this - the village is far from the city: financially, and even bureaucratically, everything is simpler.
Workplace, satellite dish and work day
Ideally, I wake up at 5-6 in the morning, work at my computer for about four hours, and then go to work with horses or drive around with construction. But in the summer, sometimes I prefer to work during the day, in the sunshine, and leave morning and evening for household affairs.
In the summer I like to work in the yard
Since I work in a distributed team, the first thing I did was screw a huge satellite dish for the Internet onto the roof. So in the place where it was possible to catch GPRS / EDGE from the phone, I received the necessary 3-4 Mbit / s for reception and about 1 Mbit / s for transmission. This pull was enough to call the team and I was worried that long pings would be a problem in work.
Thanks to this design, we have a stable internet
Having studied the topic a bit, I decided to use a mirror to amplify the signal. Some put 3G modems in the focus of the mirror, but this is not a very reliable option, so I found a specially made irradiator for the satellite dish, operating in the 3G range. They do such things in Yekaterinburg, I had to tinker with delivery, but it was worth it. The speed rose by 25 percent and reached the ceiling of the cell equipment, but the connection became stable and ceased to depend on the weather. Later, I set up the Internet for some friends in different parts of the country - and it seems that with a mirror you can catch it almost everywhere.
And two years later, Velcom upgraded the equipment of the cell to DC-HSPA + - this is the communication standard that precedes LTE. Under good conditions, it gives us 30 Mbps for reception and 4 for transmission. She presses nothing more in terms of work and heavy media content is downloaded in minutes.
My attic office
And I equipped my main workplace with an office in a separate room in the attic. There it is much easier to concentrate on tasks, nothing around is distracting.
A new router out of the box covers about half a hectare around the house, so in the mood I can work on the street under a canopy, and go somewhere in nature. It’s convenient: if I’m busy in the stable or at construction sites, I’m still connected, the phone is in my pocket, the Internet is reachable.
New neighbors and infrastructure
There are locals in our village, but my wife and I wanted to find a company of people of our circle, like-minded people. Therefore, we announced ourselves - placed an ad in the catalog of eco-settlements. Thus began our eco-village "Ulyosye".
The first neighbors appeared a year later, and now five families with children live here.
Basically, we are joined by people who have some kind of business in a big city. I am the only one who works remotely. The whole community is still at the stage of arrangement, but everyone already has some ideas for developing the village. We are not summer residents. For example, we produce our products - pick berries, dry mushrooms.
There is a forest from all sides, wild berries, all kinds of herbs like ivan tea. And we decided that it would be rational to arrange their processing. So far, we are doing all this for ourselves. But in the near future we plan to build a dryer and harvest it all on an industrial scale in order to sell it to health food stores in the city.
This we dry strawberries for the winter. While in a small home dryer
Although we live far from large cities, we are not isolated. In Belarus, medicine, a car shop, post office and police are available anywhere.
- There is no school in our village, but there is a school bus that collects children in the villages to the nearest large school, they say, is quite worthy. Some parents take their children to school on their own. Other children are home-schooled and pass exams externally, but moms and dads take them to some kind of circles anyway.
- Mail works like clockwork, no need to stand in lines –– just called and they come to you to pick up your parcel, or they bring letters, newspapers, translations home. It is very cheap.
- In the car shop, of course, the assortment is not the same as in the supermarket –– only the most necessary, simple products. But when you want something special –– get behind the wheel and roll into the city.
We produce a part of “household chemicals” ourselves - for example, the wife learned how to make tooth powder with local herbs
- There are no difficulties with medical care. Our son was born already here, and while he was very young, doctors came once a week. Then they began to visit us once a month, now that my son is 3.5 years old, they drop in even less often. We barely persuaded them not to visit us so often, but they are persistent - there are standards by which they are obliged to patronize children and the elderly.
How we launched a summer camp for kids
As a child, I had everything that the city kids lacked - horseback riding, hiking and spending the night in the forest. As I grew older, I thought more and more that it was to this background that I owed all the good that was in me. And I wanted to do something similar for modern kids. Therefore, we decided to organize a summer children's camp with an equestrian section.
This summer we spent the first shift:
Trained the guys in horse riding
Learned to care for horses and harness
Engaged in all sorts of creativity in the fresh air - sculpted from clay, wove from a vine and so on
And also went hiking. Not far from Ulesya, the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve is located and we took our guests there on an excursion.
Everything was very homely: we cooked for the children ourselves, looked after them all together, every evening the whole company gathered at one table.
I hope this story becomes systemic, and we will arrange such shifts or sections all the time.
What to do with yourself and where to spend outside the city?
I have a very good salary, even for Minsk. And even more so for the farm, where for 100 kilometers in any direction there are forests. We don’t go to restaurants, we provide ourselves with products for 40%, so the money goes mainly for construction.
For example, we regularly invest in the purchase of equipment and materials
Since everything is being built, we have a bank of time - we can get together and help a neighbor all day, and then I will ask him - and he will help me all day. The technique can also be general: we recently met with the local priest, he even lent us a tractor.
The same tractor "from the priest"
We are also engaged in social initiatives all together: when they made the summer camp, the whole village was equipped with infrastructure.
That's how they prepared the room for the summer camp
Earlier, a garden was planted together - several hundred trees. When they begin to bear fruit, the harvest will also be common.
Life hack: planted gooseberry bushes around the apple tree. It is noted that hares bypass such landings.
For locals, we, of course, are freaks - but they treat us normally, and we help them to earn extra money - extra hands are often required. This summer, for example, hay for horses was harvested with them. A lot of village responded.
Family life in the village - real challenge
I want to warn you right away - crises in relationships are very possible. In the city, you went to the offices in the morning and met only in the evening. You can hide from any roughness - go to work, to restaurants, clubs, or guests. Everyone has their own affairs. There is no such thing here, you are constantly together, you have to learn to cooperate at a completely different level. It’s like a test - if you can’t spend time with a person 24/7, then you probably need to look for another person.
Something like that
ps There is no more land left in our village, so we gradually began to “colonize” the neighboring one –– there already three families are developing the land. And I want new people to come to us. If interested, then we have a VKontakte group .
Or just come to visit - I will teach you how to ride a horse.
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