Do you ever wish that collaborating with your team when working remotely, would feel more natural? A 4,300-person survey from Digital Ocean shows that 33% of developers primarily work remotely, and 28% split their time between remote and office work.

Remote work is on the rise, and one of the toughest parts to a developer’s remote work journey is when they are onboarding to a codebase. It’s tough to know how each of the pieces in the codebase work, why the code was written this way, and who to ask for help.

Our team created a prototype called Spaces, a VS Code extension, to address issues for onboarding and collaboration, especially for remote teams.

Here are some of the ways the prototype addresses some of these concerns to create a virtual team room that feels natural:

1. Talk about code, where the code is.

That way, context is never lost.

We wanted to cut distraction and make sure that a developer only gets notifications from people they are only working directly with, day-to-day. Focused discussion means less spam.

2. Get help without hassle.

We heard from developers that context-switching is the time-killer. So we wanted to reduce this by showing that getting help or making a note on a section of code is as easy as highlighting and right-clicking.

In Spaces, there's no need to paste to Slack/Teams, choose a channel, format code, or reference a line number, when you ask questions about code.

Note: We are looking at building this feature into the prototype and this is still in progress.

3. Sharing context is simple and fast.

We envision that discussing code on another branch or giving help can be as simple as viewing another person’s environment without disrupting your own. No checking out branches.

Note: We are looking at building this feature into the prototype and this is still in progress.

The implications of asynchronous collaboration are endless. A developer can provide or receive help whenever they have a window of time, without breaking their workflow.

Here is the current Spaces prototype. Feel free to check it out!

I have spoken to hundreds of developer teams to understand how they are collaborating in today's development landscape. I would be curious to know, what do you think? What are your challenges to creating a virtual team room?