My goal was to build a location-organized hub to surface all of the great travel content out there sourced from user submissions a la product hunt, reddit, etc.
They had a 4G promotion in Europe over the summer which was FANTASTIC. I didn't realize how slow 2G felt until I had 4G back. Another reason I switched to Google Fi.
That's a whole opus unto itself! In short: easiest way to find clients is through your existing network. Finding remote work...well that depends on what exactly you do, but there's tons of stuff on http://remoteok.io.
Totally agree. I was super excited to upgrade but I'm not sold on the lack of ports + touch bar. Might wait to see what they do with the bitty MacBook. If not, this MBAir and I are together until the death!
would love to hear more - what kind of work, what is home base like, how does the kid socialize, what age did you consider, how do friends come and go... I'm thinking hard about this.
Web development. Home base has fiber internet and wifi. But I work anywhere where there's wifi, which more and more scuba dive resorts around here have. I'm not a big diver, I've done scuba and snorkeling a lot, but my family prefers island-hopping.
Socialization of kids is a uniquely Western obsession, I think— not an issue here because it's a child-friendly culture with lots of social interaction. The average age in the Philippines is 22, much lower than in the US, UK, or Canada. That means there are children everywhere here my son makes friends easily.
As far as our friends go, we meet up with people wherever we happen to be. Sometimes we're in a place where we don't know anybody, but then we just beach bum around when not working.
He's six years old, speaks three languages fluently (putting me to shame!), and is enrolled in school at the moment. Even though I work remote, I do it from a home base, and use that as a jumping off point when we travel during school holidays, summer, etc.
What other education a kid needs than to have parents who can stay with them all day and teach how to work from anywhere in the world?
I think the more important thing is how does the kid socialize?
Great article, lots of tools I didn't know of. Can you provide more info about where I can get that 2g chip outside the states? Sounds very useful to use a service like that.
Also, can you expand a little bit more about the slack integrations? I can't imagine something more than simple notifications for services like github, but you described it as it "changed your life", so I'm assuming you found ways to automate your daily life with integrations.
Glad it was helpful! I'm not totally sure where you can get a card similar to the T-Mobile or Google Fi cards outside of the US. I know there are a few "international" sim cards on the market, but I haven't tried any of them myself.
A lot of my Slack integrations these days are powered by Zapier, but for regular dev work + client management, I use simple integrations like Trello, Github, etc. The life-changing part comes from being able to communicate and get updates from the multiple teams I work with in a given day, across multiple companies and groups, in one app that also works on all of my devices.
In my Slack team, I've also set up some private channels where I pipe in things like twitter alerts, flight alerts, etc. so that helps too!
How do you manage the legalities, work visas etc. Many countries are quite strict about entering the country depending on whether you are entering for work or pleasure purposes.
I haven't used work visas anywhere. I'm not going to the country for the purpose of work. I'm there as a tourist and do work while I'm there. Not typically engaging in any business transactions within the country.
If I tell that story at the US border there is a good chance I have to turn around if I may believe reality tv and comments here which is why I go to the US strictly for vacation (usually not even taking a laptop). Is that just paranoia or?
I've been taking a break from working on http://101in365.com to watch the commercials sometimes, but yeah... hacking on a project is way more fun! Managed to get a lot done today too! Good that my friends have all be pre-occupied by the game so I can concentrate!
When designing something from scratch, my process goes from a bit of sketch on graph paper to a Photoshop mockup. I'll let that stew for a day or so and tweak it here and there, maybe share with some friends for feedback, and then start coding it. I generally put all of the main elements into a structure and use FireBug to push things around to where I like them!
For redesigns of existing sites, it's more an exercise of rearranging elements that are already there so I -may- go into Photoshop and see what I come up with or I might just go straight into FireBug and move things around to get a general sense of where I want to go with it. This is especially helpful for proposing (quick) design changes to a client.
