Overnight WFH: A PH Developer's Lockdown Setup

Archive note: this is a backdated post, written years later while rebuilding this site. It’s dated to the moment it covers, but the hindsight is real.

On March 16, Luzon went into Enhanced Community Quarantine. Whatever plans companies had for “gradually exploring remote work” got compressed into a single weekend. Monday morning, every developer in the country was a remote developer.

Two months ago I wrote about keeping a portable dev setup as a hygiene thing. That post aged in a way I did not intend.

What broke first

Not the code. The coordination:

• Standups turned into chaotic group calls until everyone learned the mute button.
• “Quick questions” that used to be a tap on the shoulder became either a paragraph in chat (good, searchable) or a surprise video call (bad, please stop).
• Deployments that depended on one person’s machine or office network access became everyone’s problem at once.
• Internet became the team’s shared boss battle. One developer’s line drops and a whole code review session goes with it.

The setup that emerged

After a week of adjusting, my working arrangement settled into something like this:

1. Async by default. Everything important written down — chat threads, ticket comments, PR descriptions. Calls reserved for things that genuinely need back-and-forth. This isn’t just preference; with PH home internet, assuming everyone can hold a stable video call at 2pm is fantasy.
2. Mobile data as failover. A prepaid SIM with a data promo, tested before it’s needed. Tethering through a phone is a bad day, not a lost day.
3. A real workspace, even if small. The first few days of working from a couch convinced me my spine had opinions. A table, a chair, and a boundary the household understands: if I’m seated here, I’m at work.
4. Overcommunicating availability. “Brownout here, back in ~1hr, latest branch is pushed” beats silently disappearing. Pushing WIP branches daily went from good practice to social contract.

The part nobody puts in setup posts

The hard part of that first week wasn’t technical. It was working while the news got worse, while checkpoints went up, while everyone quietly recalculated how long their situation could hold. Productivity advice felt absurd against that backdrop. Some days the win was just: the code got pushed.

If there’s one takeaway from week one, it’s this: remote work technology was the easy part — Git, chat, and a deploy pipeline already solved it. Remote work practice — writing things down, trusting people you can’t see, designing around unreliable infrastructure — that’s what every PH team had to learn in fast-forward.

We didn’t know yet how long the lockdown would last. The setup, it turned out, needed to hold for a lot longer than two weeks.