Home is the here and now (Buddhism)
Six months ago I decided to quit my job and see the world. Well, the decision came a long time before, but six months ago I started the adventure. I'm still hoping it won't end soon. I finished my math bachelor degree and my girlfriend just finished her summer project of managing a summer camp. So, we were both without any tasks on our hands and we decided it was the time. In this article I am going to outline my overall experience and things I learned from digital nomading in India.
(On my computer in Dharamshala)
How it started
I didn't plan to make it the centre of my trip, but I decided to buy a laptop to accompany us. I was so used to having one with me everywhere, it felt natural for me to get one (as I had returned my old one to the company I worked for). This decision did impact my trip, as I started developing the idea of becoming what I later found out is called a "Digital Nomad". When I bought it I just thought that I would use it mostly to watch movies in our room, stay updated with news in the tech industry and start working on some ideas I had for apps.
On August 4th, three friends and I boarded a plane to Madrid. We were on our way to the Boom festival in Portugal. We rented a car with all the camping equipments we needed and went on a road trip. We passed through Sevilla and Cadiź,and then through some camping sites in south Portugal. We had two blasting weeks in the Boom and its 3-day after-party. The month passed pretty quickly and as you can imagine I didn't touch the computer once. Even when I arrived in Amsterdam I didn't find time to use it as that was when I met Renana, my girlfriend, for the first time in 3 weeks. So, we were busy enjoying the first vacation together.
Travelling to India
Renana and I left Amsterdam for Delhi, India on the first day of September and started a new part of this vacation, one which would last for the next four months. But I only started playing with the computer after a week in Leh (Leh is the capital state of the northern province of Ladakh, one of northern cities in India, close to the borders with China and Pakistan). It didn't take us long to get into the Indian way of life (at least the tourist Indian way of life) – sitting in a coffee shop for the larger part of the day, talking, reading a book, playing games and, for me, open my computer from time to time.
(Leh from above)
Inception of my blog
I started working on FreeCodeCamp projects - building a tribute page, portfolio webpage, and other projects. FreeCodeCamp is built from front-end projects in the beginning, to back-end project and then a final part of full stack development. Although I was by definition (and experience) a full stack developer, I decided to go with the front-end projects first as it seemed easier to me. I somewhat regret it now, because front-end doesn't really interest me and I don't really see my future in it. It took me the most part of the last 5 months to finish and I would have probably enjoyed more and got more usable experience if I had focused on the back-end projects.
After playing with FreeCodeCamp by myself for some time, I came across a forum post by some guy going by the name of @tropicalchancer who was starting a cohort of people going through FCC. He opened a slack team for us and we started connecting. I'm not sure how many we were at the beginning, but since then we grew and we have over 6 groups vs the first initial group he intended opening.
It was a great opportunity for me, to talk to fellow members working on different parts of the challenges and helping each other. In addition to working on FCC, we also started working on different projects. One of the was "Humans of FCC" project, which was a site aiming to introduce the different people working on the FCC curriculum. @tropicalchancer wanted me to write something for the project and tell people about how I travel and program. So, I answered him and that inspired me to open a blog about the subject. A blog about the adventures of a digital nomad in India.
I was planning to call it "The travelling programmer" or "The programming traveller" but both didn't click for me. So, I started googling these terms and found the term "Digital Nomad".
From Wikipedia:
"Digital nomads use wireless internet, smartphones, Voice over IP, and cloud-based applications to work remotely wherever they live or travel. Digital nomads also often use co-working spaces, cafes, house sitting agreements, and shared offices in major cities around the world."
So, I named my blog "The digital nomad". This term appealed to me because that exactly what I want to be. To find my home anywhere and have the ability to open my computer and start working, when I want and where I want.
Interacting with others and maintaining relationships
I came across many people from the tech industry while travelling. Some of them were on strict vacation, some were, like me, digital-nomading. The questions came along – How do you do it? How can you find a job working remotely? Is it even possible? Don't you get lonely? Does your girlfriend like it? How do you build a relationship? How do you meet people? I asked these questions and got asked in return.
Currently, I'm not working, and I didn't find a job while travelling. I am still planning to find something that will let me continue this. For now, (as I am writing this from Amsterdam) my top priority is to find something that will let me work in places where the sun actually shines ;) But I do know there's a huge community for digital nomads. There's at least one subreddit, there is nomad-list which give a lot of information and tools, and also has a website that helps us, digital nomads, to find work doing what we like.
Finding people to communicate with is also not a big problem. Nomad-list gives you the platform to connect to people who are staying in the same place as you. My biggest tip for you in that regard is to find a good coffee shop that people work from. Digital nomads are mostly friendly and always like to talk to each other, that's one of the reasons we sit in coffee shops. I do find myself missing my homebound friends and family. I haven't seen them in six months and I'm really looking forward to seeing them again.
(My cat Dosit stays in Israel and she can't join me either)
As with everything in life, the biggest question so far is about relationships. How to maintain one while travelling? Is it going to be a long-distance relationship, or does my partner joins me? If she does, what can she do? Part of being a digital nomad means you should work. Even if I get paid enough for both of us, she needs to do something. As I'm working, I need to be bound sometimes to the same place, sometimes for longer periods. What can she do while we are there? Is she staying with me in the same place? Will she travel around, while we meet once a week? Once a month? I don't have an answer to these questions. And it only seems like they get more complicated. Suddenly, it's not only me, but she also starts missing her friends and family. This is a big open question to which I would love to find an answer.
Internet Connectivity
As I started travelling and programming (AKA DNing), I came across a big problem I hadn’t thought of before. India is not Israel and there isn't an internet connection everywhere. In Leh, there could be a few days in a row without any internet connection, and when we went to the villages around we found many ones that didn't have it. And although, as we went south this became a lesser problem, the connection wasn't always stable and it almost never was fast. I remember our happiness when we arrived in Amsterdam at the beginning of January and found a good internet connection. Forget about my programming needs. I almost never used YouTube or other music apps in India, and we were mostly restricted to the music and tv-shows I downloaded before we arrived in India.
For this, I did find a few solutions. The first one was to learn how to work offline. Which means downloading the articles you are interested in (Pocket app is my friend) and API documentation (DevDocs), teaching your package managers to install from the cache instead of using the online registry (--cache-min Infinity on npm and the offline flag on yarn). I even cloned the whole FreeCodeCamp repository to be able to work on it while offline, which proved useful and allowed me to contribute some code to the repository.
Another solution was buying a sim card with 4G data. They don't have full coverage but it is good, and when you have a connection it works really well. I used that for some part of my trip, but I actually stopped using it when I started feeling too connected.
Maintaining a balance
This section brings me to another question. Am I on vacation or working/studying? When you have a regular job, the schedule basically goes like that – working from Sunday to Thursday (changes from country to country) from 9 am to 5 pm, relax on the weekends, and having a work-free vacation from time to time. But when I was in India, digital-nomading, I found myself opening the computer on Friday and Saturday, and in the nights. I didn't have a strong schedule to work around and for a few times I actually forgot everything around me and was stuck with my face inside the computer for hours and hours.
Lucky me I was with Renana, and she made me stop. She forced me to realize that I was on a vacation and that I do want to enjoy it. We did argue about whether I am wasting too much of my time on the computer, but looking backward, she might have been right. Most of these 4 months I wasn't sure whether I came to India either to find a chill place to work at, or to find a place to chill at.
Conclusion
All of the above get me to the last question. Does this way of life suit me? Should I go back to being an office worker (something which I have never really done)? Should I settle and find a concrete base to my life?
My plan for the near future is to find a job that will let me continue digital-nomading around the world. I was never good staying in one place for a long time. The best thing about digital nomading is that you can also do it from your home. You don't have to travel, but you can. Currently, my plan is that we find a job we like and that will suit a remote worker. We will settle in one place until Renana feels like she's ready for another adventure somewhere in the world. Back to India? Sri Lanka? Philippines? Europe? U.S? Costa Rica? It doesn’t matter - I just need to choose.