For those of you on distributed tech teams, what tools are you using? Some "core" ones I have seen frequently used are: Yammer, Pivotal, Github, Google Hangout, Skype, and real-time chat of some sort (e.g. Grove.io, CampFire, IRC server). Any others that have worked really well for people? I've been a little curious about wemux (https://github.com/zolrath/wemux) as of late.
We use Github, iChat (but have been using Google Hangout more), Campfire.
I'm a remote worker, so I have switched to tmux + console emacs (some guys prefer vim). That works much better than ScreenSharing and a typical GUI editor.
I've checked out wemux, but it didn't solve my pain-point which was the ssh setup at the remote end.
The bigger deal is not whether your team has the tools. But whether they use the tools. Co-located people may talk in campfire/irc/group chat, and some may not even log in. But remote workers depend on it.
I've worked at Automattic (a distributed company) for more than 5 years. The number one communication tool/method for most teams is IRC. We run our own internal IRC server, that logs everything in every channel. IRC is great for real time chat, when people are around at the same time.
Next most used communication method are internal P2s - http://p2theme.com/ - which is great for async communication. With people all over the world it is important to have a good async communication method.
Another reason both IRC and P2 are so important is that they have URLs for history. Anyone in the company can go back and read through the discussion.
The third communication method is Skype/Google Hangout. Many teams will have a regular (weekly is common) voice or video chat, generally less than an hour.
Jingle (the protocol behind Google Talk) works great for 1:1 calls. I'm experimenting with Mumble for group voip, though I often fall back to Skype just because everyone already has it.
But for actual coding I've found http://pair.io (using tmux) to work fantastically; I can't wait for them to come out of private alpha.
We use Pivotal, Skype, Whatsapp, Github, Zoho (CRM/Projects), Dropbox. Of all these Pivotal + Github seem to be by far the highest on the list; without those we would be dead.
We have some glue tying these together and we use some in-house development wiki's and live-editing tools for producing faster and collaborating better.
Skype when 1:1 chat/voice is needed
Campfire (and many rooms for different chat subjects) + hubot for all group-based chats
Google Docs for collaborative spec editing
Github for technical discussion (pull requests/issues)
Pivotal tracker for day-to-day "what is s/he working on?"
In my previous experience of working on a distributed team, the main things were Skype, Basecamp and Bitbucket. Well, except for the designers who used email exclusively and infuriatingly :)
In my experience it's fairly easy to convince designers to use shared Dropbox folders instead to exchange design assets. And it's a lot better way of doing it than email.
