Building Community in Remote Alaska: Online and In Real Life

There's a particular kind of silence that happens at 9 PM in Caswell Lakes, Alaska in January. It's negative thirty outside. The aurora is doing something absurd across the sky that would break Instagram if you could photograph it properly. And you're alone in a cabin, three hours from the nearest city, wondering if you've made a spectacular mistake by choosing this life.

I moved here deliberately. I'm a 52-year-old software engineer who spent decades in offices and co-working spaces, surrounded by other developers, going to meetups and conferences, getting coffee with colleagues. And then I chose to live in a place where my nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away and the closest tech meetup is in Anchorage — a drive that takes two and a half hours on a good day and becomes genuinely dangerous in winter.

The question everyone asks me is some version of: "Don't you get lonely?" The honest answer is complicated. And the strategies I've developed for building and maintaining community from a remote Alaskan cabin are probably useful for anyone working remotely, even if your version of "remote" is a suburb thirty minutes from a major city.

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The Loneliness Problem Is Real

I'm not going to pretend this is easy or that I've solved it completely. Anyone who tells you remote work has no social cost is either lying or has a different definition of "social" than I do.

The first six months after moving to Alaska full-time, I noticed something creeping in. It wasn't dramatic loneliness — it was more like a slow dimming. I'd go three or four days without a real conversation with another human being. Not a Slack message, not an email, not a comment thread. An actual conversation where someone's face moved and their voice carried emotion and we were present in the same moment.

I'd been a remote worker for years before moving to Alaska, but I'd always lived near a city. There were coffee shops, meetups, a gym. Those ambient social interactions — the barista who knows your order, the gym regular you nod at — they add up to more than you realize until they're gone.

In Caswell Lakes, the gas station is a twenty-minute drive. The grocery store is forty-five minutes. The isolation is not metaphorical.

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Online Community: What Actually Works

Let me break down what I've tried, what failed, and what stuck.

Slack and Discord Communities — Mostly Noise

I joined about a dozen developer Slack groups and Discord servers in my first year here. Most of them were useless for genuine connection. They were either too large (thousands of members, no real conversations) or too narrowly focused on technical Q&A (helpful for debugging, terrible for human connection).

The ones that worked had a few things in common:

• Small membership. Under 200 people. Ideally under 50.
• Some barrier to entry. Whether it's an application process, a paid membership, or an invite-only policy, the friction filters out people who join and never participate.
• Off-topic channels that are actually used. A community where everyone only talks about TypeScript is a help desk. A community where people also share what they're cooking, complain about their weather, and celebrate personal wins — that's a community.

I ended up in two groups that became genuinely important to me. One is a small Slack for indie developers and technical content creators. The other is a Discord for people who work remotely from unusual locations — not digital nomads hopping between Lisbon and Bali, but people who live permanently in rural, isolated, or unconventional places.

Video Calls — Underrated and Underused

I resisted scheduled video calls for years. They felt like meetings, and meetings are the thing I moved to Alaska to escape.

I was wrong. Scheduled one-on-one video calls with people I actually care about are the single most effective tool for maintaining community from a remote location. Not group calls. Not standup meetings. Not webinars. One-on-one conversations with a specific person, scheduled regularly enough that the relationship doesn't decay.

I have a standing weekly call with a friend who's a staff engineer at a company in Seattle. We've been doing it for over a year. Sometimes we talk about code. Sometimes we talk about what our kids are doing. Sometimes one of us is having a bad week and the other one just listens. It's the closest thing I have to the hallway conversations I used to have in an office.

I also do a monthly call with three other technical writers. We share numbers, swap strategies, complain about Amazon's dashboard, and generally function as a peer support group for a very specific and somewhat lonely profession.

The key insight: you have to schedule it. "Let's catch up sometime" is a social contract that expires immediately. "Tuesday at 10 AM your time, every week" is a relationship.

Open Source — Community Through Code

Contributing to open source projects gave me something I didn't expect: a sense of belonging to a team without having an employer.

I'm not talking about submitting a PR to React and hoping someone reviews it in six months. I'm talking about smaller projects where the maintainers are accessible, the community is tight, and your contributions are visible and appreciated.

When you consistently show up in a project's issue tracker, submit thoughtful PRs, review other people's code, and participate in discussions about direction — you become part of something. People know your name. They ping you when something relevant comes up. You have context and history with a group of people working toward a shared goal.

It's not the same as having coworkers. But it fills some of the same space.

Writing as Connection

This might sound counterintuitive, but writing articles for Grizzly Peak Software has been one of my most effective community-building tools. Not because writing is inherently social — it's one of the most solitary activities there is. But because publishing creates inbound connections.

Every article I publish generates emails, comments, and messages from people who resonate with something I wrote. Some of those turn into ongoing conversations. A few have turned into genuine friendships.

The dynamic is different from social media. When someone reads a 3,000-word article you wrote about your experience with burnout recovery or building a side project in your fifties, and they take the time to email you about it — that person is self-selecting into your community. They've already demonstrated that they care about the same things you care about.

I've had lunch (well, video lunch) with readers in four different countries. A few have become regular correspondents. One of them is now a collaborator on a side project. None of that would have happened if I'd stayed quiet.

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In-Person Community: The Alaska Edition

Online community is essential but insufficient. Humans need physical presence with other humans. I'm not making a philosophical argument — I'm reporting what happened to me when I tried to go without it.

The Caswell Lakes Network

Caswell Lakes has maybe 200 year-round residents spread across a wide area. Nobody here works in tech. My neighbors are mechanics, retired military, commercial fishermen, and a couple of subsistence homesteaders.

Initially, I made the mistake of thinking I needed to find other software engineers. That was wrong. What I needed was people who would show up if my truck got stuck on the road, who'd let me know if they saw a moose hanging around my property, and who I could share a beer with on a Saturday without anyone pulling out a laptop.

Community in rural Alaska is built on reciprocity. You help someone split firewood, they help you when your generator dies at midnight in February. You lend someone your truck, they bring you fresh salmon in the summer. There's no app for this. There's no community management strategy. You just show up consistently and do things for people.

It took about eight months before I felt like I was part of the Caswell Lakes community rather than a newcomer from the lower 48 who was probably going to leave in a year. The turning point was a windstorm that knocked out power for three days. I had a generator and fuel. I invited my neighbors to charge their phones and keep food cold. After that, the dynamic shifted.

Anchorage Trips — Making Them Count

I drive to Anchorage roughly twice a month for supplies, and I've learned to make those trips do double duty. I schedule any in-person meetings, coffee dates, or social activities for those days.

Anchorage has a small but genuine tech community. There's a monthly developer meetup that draws maybe 30-40 people. There's a co-working space where I sometimes spend an afternoon just to be around other humans who are staring at code. The University of Alaska Anchorage has occasional tech events.

None of this is comparable to the tech scene in Seattle or San Francisco. But that's actually an advantage. In a small scene, you meet the same people repeatedly. You build relationships faster because the pool is smaller. After a year of showing up to the Anchorage meetup, I know most of the regulars by name, and several of them have become people I'd call friends.

The Seasonal Factor

Alaska has a dramatic social calendar that's driven by daylight and temperature.

Summer is aggressively social. There are 20 hours of usable daylight. People are outside constantly. Community events happen every weekend — potlucks, bonfires, fishing trips, construction projects where everyone helps. I've had more spontaneous social interactions in a single July week in Alaska than in a month of living near a major city.

Winter is the challenge. By December, you're getting about five hours of light. Temperatures make casual outdoor socializing impractical. This is when online community becomes critical, and when the isolation can genuinely affect your mental health if you're not proactive.

My winter strategy is blunt: I schedule more video calls, I participate more actively in online communities, and I plan at least one multi-day trip to Anchorage per month specifically for social connection. I treat winter social maintenance like I treat exercise — something I do because I have to, not because I feel like it on any given day.

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What I Got Wrong Initially

I tried to recreate what I had. I spent the first few months trying to find the Alaskan equivalent of the tech community I'd left behind. That doesn't exist here, and looking for it made me miserable.

I underestimated non-tech relationships. The friendships I've built with people who have no idea what an API is are some of the most grounding relationships in my life. Not every connection needs to understand your work.

I was passive. In a city, community finds you. In rural Alaska, you have to build it deliberately. Nobody's going to knock on your door and invite you to the neighborhood barbecue unless you've already demonstrated that you're the kind of person who shows up.

I conflated introversion with not needing people. I'm an introvert. I recharge alone. That doesn't mean I can go without human connection for weeks at a time without consequences. Introversion is about energy management, not about social needs being optional.

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A Framework for Remote Community Building

Whether you're in rural Alaska or a suburb in Ohio, here's what I've learned about building community when you work remotely:

Invest in 3-5 deep relationships rather than 50 shallow ones. You don't need a huge network. You need a handful of people who genuinely know you, who you can call when things are hard, and who you make time for consistently.

Schedule everything. The natural social infrastructure of offices and cities handles scheduling for you. When you're remote, every social interaction requires deliberate planning. If it's not on your calendar, it won't happen.

Show up consistently. Whether it's a Slack community, a monthly meetup, or your neighbor's garage — consistency is what transforms a stranger into someone who's part of your life. You have to keep showing up even when it's inconvenient.

Build across contexts. Don't rely on a single community. Have tech friends and non-tech friends. Have online connections and local connections. Have peers you collaborate with and people you just enjoy being around. When one community goes through a quiet period, others sustain you.

Create inbound channels. Writing, speaking, open source contributions, teaching — anything that puts your thinking into the world creates opportunities for connection with people who share your interests. You don't have to be famous. You just have to be findable.

Accept the trade-off. I chose to live in one of the most beautiful and isolated places in America. The trade-off is that community requires more effort here than it would in a city. That trade-off is worth it for me, but I don't pretend the cost is zero.

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The Cabin at 9 PM

It's 9 PM in Caswell Lakes and it's negative thirty outside. The aurora is putting on a show. I'm alone in my cabin.

But I had a video call with my friend in Seattle this morning. I spent an hour in a Slack channel with people who are building things I care about. I helped my neighbor fix his snowmachine yesterday, and he's bringing over some moose steaks this weekend. I published an article last week and got three emails from people who connected with what I wrote.

I'm alone, but I'm not lonely. Most of the time. And on the days when I am lonely, I've learned that it passes — especially if I pick up the phone and call someone instead of just sitting with it.

Community in remote Alaska doesn't look like community in San Francisco. It's smaller, slower, more deliberate, and requires real work. But it's also more genuine than a lot of what passes for community in the tech industry — because every relationship here was chosen and maintained on purpose, not handed to you by the accident of sharing an office floor.

That might be the most valuable thing isolation teaches you: every meaningful connection in your life exists because someone decided it was worth the effort. In a city, that decision is invisible. In a cabin in Alaska, it's the whole game.

Shane Larson is a software engineer, author, and the founder of Grizzly Peak Software. He writes code, builds AI-powered products, and splits firewood from his cabin in Caswell Lakes, Alaska.