First of all, I want to thank you for being here! This site has been a long time in the making, so to finally make it live and have your support is an amazing feeling. I wanted to share a bit of our background and share the story of how Work While came to be.
My background
My name is Hayley, I am a web designer and metalsmith living in Denver, Colorado, and I'm the face behind Work While. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, went to college and got a b*llsh*t degree that did not lead to a career, traveled for a while, and then settled into Denver in 2017. I now live here with my husband Dan, our golden retriever Kronk, and our cat French Toast.
My path to starting WW has been all over the place, when I started my "career" in 2017 as a paralegal, I never thought working remotely was an option for me. I knew I didn't want to stay in law, but also didn't know what I wanted to do (thanks college).
Enter, a coding bootcamp. I know, these are all over social media, and everyone and their moms are taking these courses, but honestly this was the step I needed to make a career change. I took this six month course at University of Denver, quit my job, and began the arduous task of breaking into tech as an entry level developer.
I will also note that this course took place from October 2019 - April 2020, and we all know what happened in 2020. I was lucky enough that one of my close friends worked at a web design agency that was fully remote even before 2020, she put in a good word for me, and I got my first (low paying) job in tech. It's been a long road, but I am finally on to a different agency working toward a career I love.
How Work While was born
Fast forward two years, its 2022, travel is becoming a thing again, and Dan and I are on a trip to Costa Rica for my 30th birthday. We were originally going to go for 10 days, but when we saw a cheaper flight pop up last minute for a week earlier, we decided to go for it and work remote for a week before our PTO started. If we were going to be working that week anyway, why not do it from somewhere beautiful and fun?
We are big travelers, Costa Rica was my 30th country, and we both love staying in hostels, so we booked a hostel for our first week thinking it would be fine to work at for just a week... I'll just say, that hostel ended up being not ideal for working remotely, it would be great as just a traveler, but the wifi was weak, there weren't enough charging ports, there were only two table options in the whole hostel, and there wasn't AC so working indoors wasn't an option.
After our remote week was up, we moved to a different hostel (mainly because the town was pretty booked up that week for some reason), and the difference between these two hostels was insane. This second hostel had a designated work room with AC, the outdoor area had a ton of tables with comfy chairs and fans going to keep you cool, the ambiance was chill and relaxing, and the wifi was great. Noticing all these differences made me think, "Man I wish there was a way to search hotels based on their workability, this place would have been way better for our remote week!" and Work While was born.
We spent the rest of our trip brainstorming ideas for site and getting excited about the possibilities of what could come, and 10 months later it's finally live! This site is going to be an ever-evolving work in progress, but for now I just want it to be a resource for people like us who want to spend a week (or more!) traveling while working remotely. I hope you find this useful, and I'm so happy you're here!
Comments