Ian Graham, who is well-known in the Ottawa tech community because of his involvement with Bar Camps, Demo Camps, etc, has a new start-up called The Code Factory.
Location, location, location …
Located in Ottawa’s downtown core a couple of blocks south of Parliament Hill, The Code Factory has offices for rent, drop-in communal working space with WiFi, and a lot of character (old building, bright with lots of windows, hardwood, rickity old elevator that reminds me of office buildings in SoHo).
No three-year leases
The offices go for around $800-$1,000/month (no long-term lease required), and all have windows or skylights. The open (no cubicles) communal working space costs $5/hour, billed to the nearest half hour, and includes unlimited coffee, cappuccino, or espresso, making it a break-even for coders who spend a lot at Starbucks (think one cappuccino/hour).
Unlimited caffeine
For the communal working space, his target market is coders who work from home, but miss the energy and social life of an office and want to drop in a couple of times a week. Despite all the friendly chatter, I find I’m actually getting more done in four hours there than I do in eight hours at home.
Shut-in no more
At a 45 minute walk from my house, The Code Factory is perfect for me — I’ve worked from home for over 10 years, and the Factory gives me an excuse for a little extra exercise, gets me downtown, and gives me the buzz that comes from working around other coders. I think that Ian has done a great service for the Ottawa tech community — much more so than yet another incubator or government-subsidized fund — and that we’ll see at least one or two successful companies tracing their roots back to the Factory, as well as a lot of happy consultants like me.