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The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

thomasbacklund.com

41–50 of 87 posts

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#43
This is really cool and I'm glad to hear of someone doing this. Having the time to learn and work is key. It's hard to make any real progress when you're still trying to maintain a social life and work full time.

An idea: It might be much much easier to simply move to Mexico or Thailand. You could live on around $200-300 USD per month if you made your own food and you'd probably be a lot more comfortable than living in the woods (though I think that's amazing in its own way too).

Does anyone know of any dev boot camps or coworking spaces in the "developing world" that I should check out?

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#44
This is awesome. Personally, I occasionally daydream of "escaping it all" and coding by the ocean.

This piece reminded me of someone else who "escaped it all": Paul Lutus [1].

In the spring of 1976, he built a 12 x 16 foot (3.65 x 4.87 meter) cabin in Oregon and developed Apple Writer [2] on his Apple II. He documented his story in a piece entitled, Cottage Computer Programming [3].

[1] http://www.arachnoid.com/administration/index.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer

[3] http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#45

This is really cool and I'm glad to hear of someone doing this. Having the time to learn and work is key. It's hard to make any real progress when you're still trying to maintain a social life and work full time. An idea: It might be much much easier to simply move to Mexico or Thailand. You could live on around $200-300 USD per month if you made your own food and you'd probably be a lot more comfortable than living…

Or India. I live in Udaipur and there are many people from US/Europe staying here for months. $300/mo will take care of both food and stay. You can even teach language to make some money. I know a few people who have been living here like this for last 6 years.

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#46

This is really cool and I'm glad to hear of someone doing this. Having the time to learn and work is key. It's hard to make any real progress when you're still trying to maintain a social life and work full time. An idea: It might be much much easier to simply move to Mexico or Thailand. You could live on around $200-300 USD per month if you made your own food and you'd probably be a lot more comfortable than living…

Or India. I live in Udaipur and there are many people from US/Europe staying here for months. $300/mo will take care of both food and stay. You can even teach language to make some money. I know a few people who have been living here like this for last 6 years.

Thanks!

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#47
In another life, long before taking up coding, I spent 6 months in the mountains of southern Spain (near Grenada) living in a Rainbow community where tepees were the lodging of choice.

Amazing experience, obviously not much "work" getting done ;-)...except for this English guy, lived in a crude stone structure on the range across the way from where the community was situated. Somehow he had electricity, either through solar panels or running a mega cable to the small village higher up the range.

Anyway, he was a programmer (this is in the mid-90s, BTW) working for a bank in England -- would mail floppy disks to his employer.

Looking back now, I salute him deeply, living on the edge (literally of a mountain range) hanging out with a group of 200+ crazy pot/shroom/lsd huffing hippies -- how he got any work done is beyond me ;-)

Time flies...

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#49
post #33
post #18

Somewhat off-topic; but if you're wondering how this became a story on HN: it was submitted to the ListServe a bit over an hour ago. The ListServe is a really cool email lottery where every day one person wins the chance to send an email to everyone else on the list, and the results have been nothing short of mesmerizing so far. http://thelistserve.com/

Given that they have >22k subscribers already, the chances of actually getting to say something in your lifetime are pretty low - assuming nobody else joins and there are no repeats, it would take over 60 years for everyone to get to post once. That said, it sounds interesting, as a "15 minutes of fame lottery" at least.

It's well worth it for the range of people and emails. It adds a little spice to every day, and usually gives you something to think about. A little peak into how crazy different everyone lives their lives. It doesn't really matter to me if I'm never picked. In fact, I probably wouldn't want to be picked...

Re: The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest

#50
post #18

Somewhat off-topic; but if you're wondering how this became a story on HN: it was submitted to the ListServe a bit over an hour ago. The ListServe is a really cool email lottery where every day one person wins the chance to send an email to everyone else on the list, and the results have been nothing short of mesmerizing so far. http://thelistserve.com/

My friend also runs the ListServe Archive. It's quite interesting to dig through some of the older submissions and see the variety of the content. http://thelistservearchive.com/

Direct link to the email for this story, which also contains interesting details not on the site:

http://thelistservearchive.com/2013/06/06.html

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