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150 days of living and coding in a van

ruby-on-wheels.github.io

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Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#351

Post by chasedehan »

bshimmin wrote: post #35
grecy wrote: post #24

I am doing something somewhat related. I built a Jeep Wrangler into a house on wheels [1], and am driving around Africa for two years. I am freelancing for Magazines, and earning money through my website and social presence. I have not done any coding on this trip, mostly becuase I find it hard to get remote work that meets my flexibility needs - i.e. weeks off-grid and only occasional checkins/calls. Last time I dro…

I think work is the big issue with this sort of lifestyle (leaving aside children, as others have mentioned). Many remote gigs still want a daily standup, a weekly sprint retrospective and planning session, etc, and none of that really works if you're truly nomadic and can't really guarantee where you are or how good your Internet connexion is at any given time. The article talks about the flexibility of his lifestyl…

I am struggling with this on my current employer. I really want to go temporarily nomadic (spend a couple weeks in a travel trailer and then a couple weeks at my house/in office).

The challenge is that I was trying to soften the remote aspect by working from home more often, but then caught significant flack from my managers that "it kills teamwork." The most frustrating thing about it all is that I, as a Data Scientist, work on a lot of "skunkworks" types of projects where I spend almost zero time collaborating with others.

The challenge is finding some of the freelance or fully remote jobs for data science work.

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#352

Post by mod »

mmahemoff wrote: post #94

I'm curious - don't people miss big monitors when coding on a laptop? I've done a fair amount of coding on laptops while travelling and it's okay, but I feel like a big monitor is optimal for most work and wouldn't want a permanent situation with just laptop. I like to have logs, command line, and editor all visible, and ideally a browser too. The editor alone is much more useful in a big window where you can see a f…

I code on a laptop, and I prefer it to big, dual-screen setups.

I do admit it's a very large laptop, but it doesn't have to be.

I code in Vim, inside tmux, inside a terminal. All of my ide-type tasks happen there. Tests, code, whatever else.

Then I have a browser open. I keep it on a different virtual desktop and switch between.

I'm a web developer so that's about it. Sometimes I have postman or insomnia open, and I typically keep that on the same desktop as my browser.

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#353

Post by hackeraccount »

munificent wrote: post #320
pavel_lishin wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I gave the original post to my wife and her first question was “How’s the guy coping to live alone?” My knee-jerk response is, "blissfully." I live with my wife, a 19 month old, and two cats. I love them, but I would love, love, love to spend a week entirely by myself - going to bed and waking up on my own schedule.

Introverted Dad with a wife, two daughters, two dogs, and two cats reporting in. Wife and kid #1 are both high energy. I love my home life, but there is definitely some part of my psyche that is drained by it. I took a couple of days to drive to the middle of nowhere in Oregon to see the eclipse by myself. My goal was literally to be as far from other people and as solitary as possible for the whole trip. (Not exactl…

What do kids want? Your soul. How much do they want? All of it.

I love my daughter. That's the truth of it though. Sometimes it makes me you happy and you want to give and give and give. Sometimes it makes me you unhappy and you want to curse them for their wretched selfish neediness. It doesn't matter though. They'll take and take.

Of course I was the same way with my parents so it's all fair enough. But like you say, sometimes I find myself humming Hungry Heart ("I got a wife and kids in Baltimore Jack, I went out for a ride and I never came back") and just wishing they'd all just leave me along for a week. A day. A couple of minutes.

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#355

Post by clort »

rbritton wrote: post #348
driverdan wrote: post #268

Nice writeup. I also live in a vehicle. I have a 25ft (7.6m) former airport shuttle bus I've converted to my home. It took me over six months of full time work and it's still not complete. I've lived in it for a bit over four months. Overall it has been good but not without challenges. I'm currently busy working which has led to neglecting stuff I need to finish on the bus. I can't travel far until I finish these thi…

What do you do for internet? I don't have any intention to live full time in a vehicle, but I want to be able to take off for an arbitrary amount of time and work while away. I've done a few test outings but generally end up reinforcing my conclusion that cellular is not overly reliable when you're more than an hour or so outside a moderate-sized town. I currently have to carry equipment for two separate carriers (AT…

You have to let go - I got 4G mobile wifi earlier this year, its fast as heck and sometimes when I don't get a signal.. I don't connect to the internet! Can always read a book, or go for a walk.

I'm kind of extreme though; I've been using cellular data almost exclusively since 2001 so its nothing new. I've spent plenty of time out of range. I think that if you are out of range and you need to connect; its time to move on.

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#356

Post by mod »

logfromblammo wrote: post #262
coldtea wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious - don't people miss big monitors when coding on a laptop? No. Some of us work even more focused on a single smaller screen even than having 10 BS windows asking for our attention (and I include debuggers in those, the ultimate hop-around time sink for some developers). Besides, people managed to write software for several decades before larger than 14" screens became the norm. Heck, until the late seven…

And once upon a time, people built automobiles with hand tools instead of power tools, conveyors, and robots. You can still do that, of course, but you will not be competitive with the likes of Ford and Toyota. A higher-resolution screen, positioned closer to the eyeball, can substitute for a larger monitor. But even then, that uses only a fraction of my available visual field. VR technology could eventually solve th…

As a programmer, my limiting factor has nothing to do with my available visual field.

Has nothing to do with resolution, either, once I've achieved a relatively normal resolution. Today, that's 1600x900.

I don't think I'm "using hand tools."

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#357

Post by gnarcoregrizz »

rbritton wrote: post #348
driverdan wrote: post #268

Nice writeup. I also live in a vehicle. I have a 25ft (7.6m) former airport shuttle bus I've converted to my home. It took me over six months of full time work and it's still not complete. I've lived in it for a bit over four months. Overall it has been good but not without challenges. I'm currently busy working which has led to neglecting stuff I need to finish on the bus. I can't travel far until I finish these thi…

What do you do for internet? I don't have any intention to live full time in a vehicle, but I want to be able to take off for an arbitrary amount of time and work while away. I've done a few test outings but generally end up reinforcing my conclusion that cellular is not overly reliable when you're more than an hour or so outside a moderate-sized town. I currently have to carry equipment for two separate carriers (AT…

i worked remotely for 5 months in a class C RV, in some really remote areas, across 36 states total. in my experience, internet was great 90% of the time. it was faster in rural/small town rather than metro areas, i'm assuming because there's less load on the towers. the worst parts were actually in national parks, which had almost no service. some mountainous areas were bad depending on which side of the hills you were on. deeply forested areas were hit or miss. usually, it didn't take more than driving a few hundred yards to to go from bad to acceptable service. anything near a highway was pretty much great. i also worked from a lot of parking lots in commercial areas, all of which had good cell service. i was able to skype and work over SSH fine. it was as good as broadband in most cases. i was worried about the internet the most when i started the trip, but it turned out to be the least of my problems.

i used ~150GB/month, with an unlimited verizon plan. i used a dual antenna hotspot, with an extra antenna extender. if i had 3g service somewhere, i could use the hotspot and antenna and usually get lte. i thought i would need satellite, but i didn't. its also slow and expensive. slower than 3g probably.

when done, i sold the RV for the same price i bought it for, saw a lot of the US, saved $12k on rent, spent $2k on gas and $700 on tires, $200/mo on internet... that's about it. i got a LOT for my money

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#359

Post by driverdan »

rbritton wrote: post #348
driverdan wrote: post #268

Nice writeup. I also live in a vehicle. I have a 25ft (7.6m) former airport shuttle bus I've converted to my home. It took me over six months of full time work and it's still not complete. I've lived in it for a bit over four months. Overall it has been good but not without challenges. I'm currently busy working which has led to neglecting stuff I need to finish on the bus. I can't travel far until I finish these thi…

What do you do for internet? I don't have any intention to live full time in a vehicle, but I want to be able to take off for an arbitrary amount of time and work while away. I've done a few test outings but generally end up reinforcing my conclusion that cellular is not overly reliable when you're more than an hour or so outside a moderate-sized town. I currently have to carry equipment for two separate carriers (AT…

I have a raspberry pi setup as router with a USB Alfa wifi adaptor for rebroadcasting free wifi. I also have a 4G hotspot as a fallback.

I've found the pi doesn't work well because it's having power or IO issues where the external adaptor is slow when rebroadcasting on internal wifi. I'm upgrading to an Intel NUC when I have the time to finish setting it up.

Re: 150 days of living and coding in a van

#360

Post by clort »

codesnik wrote: post #82
zenandpeace wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern yachts basically sail themselves on an autopilot. If weather is not rough you can do whatever you want, as long as you still keep looking around from time to time

staring at the screen while not in the calmest water isn't the nicest experience.

When you are on a boat for a while, you become accustomed to the motion. Certainly looking at a screen would not bother me at sea.

(there are exceptions - some people never do and they should perhaps stay on shore)

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