Digital Nomad or bust

Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by the web. I can still remember the late nights chatting with friends on ICQ and the hideous Geocities webpages I built shortly after we first had the internet connected at home maybe 20 years ago.

Recently I’ve begun to fully appreciate how short life is, and how important it is to spend it doing something you love. For the last few years I’ve been fortunate enough to work in a job I enjoy that enables me to travel frequently, but it’s not something I’m passionate about. I’ve come to realise that working 9-5 in a cubicle somewhere is not the way I want to spend the next 30 or so years of my working life.

I’ve made the decision to build a new career as a web developer, partly because with a laptop and a decent internet connection I’ll be able to work from anywhere in the world. I’ve been inspired to make this jump by people like Pieter Levels, the founder of startups such as Nomad List and Remote OK that are powering the Digital Nomad revolution.

I’ve been working on building my web development skills for about about six months now, and after some initial apprehension I’ve discovered I really enjoy coding, so much so that it’s rare for a day to go by without me pushing something up to GitHub. It’s still early days, but having completed Thinkful’s Front End Web Development course (and a few others) I’ve got a solid foundation of skills to build on and have already rolled out a few simple projects. The next step is to learn Ruby and Rails, and I’ll be blogging about my experiences along the way.