anchor.diff:  
   [Marcia](/team/#XMDRamos), who we met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, along with [Douglas](/team/#dbalexandre) and [Felipe](/team/#FelipeArtur), writes:
   
  -> After a few months with GitLab, it was very important to me finally meeting people in person, **it made me feel more human in our virtual world**. More exciting yet, was hanging out with such amazing guys, interested in what we have to share, in what we think about our job, how do we feel about working remotely, what is awesome about GitLab and what we feel is missing. **Such openness makes us feel included, touched.**
  +> After a few months with GitLab, it was very important to me finally meeting people in person, **it made me feel more human in our virtual world**. More exciting yet, was hanging out with such amazing guys, interested in what we have to share, in what we think about our job, how we feel about working remotely, what is awesome about GitLab and what we feel is missing. **Such openness makes us feel included, touched.**
   >
  -> For our tech-generation, strengthening our relationships is essential, otherwise everything around us ends up superficial; we won’t ever feel fulfilled. As we usually spend most of our time working, it is so important to be with people, to share our concerns, to help, to collaborate, to participate, and to have moments of joy. **I feel so grateful for having met these folks face-to-face.** Thanks guys, and thanks GitLab for allowing us to do this kinda thing!
  +> For our tech-generation, strengthening our relationships is essential, otherwise everything around us ends up superficial; we won’t ever feel fulfilled. As we usually spend most of our time working, it is so important to be with people, to share our concerns, to help, to collaborate, to participate, and to have moments of joy. **I feel so grateful for having met these folks face to face.** Thanks guys, and thanks GitLab for allowing us to do this kinda thing!
   
   [Pedro](/team/#pedromscom), who we met in Lisbon, Portugal, writes:
   
  
positive.code: 
  We would like to thank GitLab for making these things possible through [the way we work](/handbook/), for actively encouraging trips like this by covering a [significant portion of the cost](/handbook/#travel-to-visit-team-members), and ultimately for having built a company with a [culture](/culture/) and [team](/team/) like no other.
  
  Stay tuned for our followup to ["GitLab in Action"](/2016/08/24/gitlab-in-action/), covering our travels through Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania in more detail!
  
  {: .text-center}
  ![Lisbon sticker wall](/images/blogimages/around-the-world-in-6-releases/lisbon-sticker-wall.jpg){: .shadow}<br>
  
negative.code: 
  Seen from Taipei, the European workday starts at around 4pm, and the American workday doesn't start until 10pm, so there is very little overlap with much of the rest of the team. While your mornings are nice and quiet and offer you a chance to concentrate on your work and catch up on emails and todos without interruption, that changes just when your workday is about to end. You get responses to all of the chat messages and GitLab comments you sent earlier, people start mentioning you on new things, and you are left with a choice: Do I work a little bit more and respond to them now, or do I respond in the morning, effectively blocking them until _their_ morning, a full 24 hours later?
  
  Being the kind, helpful people we are, we chose the former, and as those things go, before we knew it the clock struck 12 and we had been working for 15 hours straight.
  
  Turns out it's really hard to stick to regular working hours when most of the people you work with are half a world away. In the end, we did what Jen-Shin had already found as working best for him: we shifted our workday a number of hours to better align with Europe. Other people work in the morning, take a break for a few hours to do whatever it is people do, and work some more in the evening. [Working hours are flexible](/handbook/#working-hours), so everyone finds something that works for them. Of course, as more people from the APAC region join the team, and as our people get more evenly distributed among timezones, much of this issue will resolve itself automatically.
  
  Another example of an issue our APAC team members face is the inconvenient timing of the daily company-wide [Team Call](/handbook/#team-call): 8:30am in San Francisco, 5:30pm in Amsterdam, but 12:30am in Taipei. Of course the agenda is in a shared document, but not being able to hear or react live to the stories people share about their lives, or to share your own with the rest of the team, makes you feel like you miss out, and – in a sense – like you are being left out. To help with this, we have started [recording all of our team calls](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/peopleops/issues/1) including the "what did you do this weekend?" bit, and have a dedicated [APAC Team Call](/handbook/#team-call) for those in that region and anyone else who wants to join, to give them the same regular opportunity to share stories about their lives, and to talk with colleagues about something other than work.
  
  Bottom line is, hearing about these issues from a distance is one thing, but being there and experiencing it yourself is totally different.
  
  