How Programming Helped Me Becoming a Digital Nomad

Today I’d like to share with you my experiences in becoming a digital nomad and starting a world trip.

I’d like to show you how software development – and this blog! – helped me starting a completely new life 🙂

Who is a digital nomad?

I’m sure you’ve already came across the term digital nomad. I won’t give you the exact definitions, as I think this term is already overused nowadays. For me, being a digital nomad means to be location-independent while still being professionally active (either by generating active or passive income).

So, enough theory 😀

Why have I become a digital nomad?

As you can guess from this article’s title, I can now call myself a digital nomad. So why have I decided to become a location-independent person? 🤔

As you could read in my post about renaming this blog to codejourney.net and also on my about page, I’ve been a huge traveling addict for some time. It also turned out to be my and my wife’s common passion. With time we also created an Instagram account and traveling blog in order to show our travels to others and – hopefully – inspire them to go for their own trip. During our last year’s trip to Thailand, we met a lot of people who traveled and worked remotely. Then we thought: “hey, why won’t we connect traveling the world and working?”

What’s more, we’ve never been attached to things or places and we thought that our casual, everyday life was just boring. We needed a change.

We didn’t (and we still don’t) have our own flat, children or mortgage, so there was literally nothing really stopping us from dropping everything and going.

Finding a remote job

The most important thing to make this dream come true was to find a fully remote job. To be honest, my previous job (I worked as a .NET Developer and Team Leader) was very good and challenging. I really liked it. I also met there a lot of people who pushed me forward and allowed me to develop – both as a developer and as a person. Unfortunately, it was not possible to work remotely for this company so I needed to find a 100% remote position.

Remote working in Poland is still not as popular as in the other western countries. Despite that, I managed to find a new job in one of the Polish software houses. It was quite a change for me, as currently I’m not managing a team anymore, but I’m back to pure programming. So far it feels awesome 🙂 I missed full-time programming a lot! Such Team Leader – programmer transition is a separate topic – let’s keep it for another article.

I started working for a new company still being in Poland. It allowed me to go to the office physically and meet the team I’m working with now. It helped a lot.

Programmer – perfect remote profession

The ease of finding a remote job was of course because of me being a programmer. Software development is currently probably the best profession to find a remote position in. I’m lucky enough to be a developer and I’m really grateful for that. I’m aware that becoming a digital nomad may be much harder for people working in another industries.

However, not only programming helped me turning my life upside down. There are many aspects around programming community which helped me even start thinking about such a decision. Lot of people I met at work or at the conferences were also engaged in personal development topics. My colleagues often recommended me to follow some inspiring people. I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t work in IT, I wouldn’t develop that much as a person. I wouldn’t start following and getting inspired by a lot of people mush wiser than me. So, IT community – thanks for that! 🙏

Role of this blog

Last but not least, this blog – and all of you, my dear readers 🙂 – helped me a lot in becoming a digital nomad and starting this new life I dreamed about. Conducting a blog gave me a lot of confidence. I’m very happy that many of you find my articles helpful. You often ask questions and start discussions, both in the comments and via email. This really makes me feel that the time I spent here (not much recently, but I hope now you see why!) is not lost 😉 Thanks a lot guys! 🙏

What’s more, for the last 1-2 years I’ve been getting more and more involved in team management tasks at work. This blog helped me to always stay up-to-date with programming and technology. It definitely made my “coming back” much easier and less painful 😀

Dropping everything with one-way ticket

Long story short, that’s how on 13/06/2019 we dropped everything and started a world-trip with one-way ticket. Our first stop is Georgia (the country). We’re staying here for few months and will then move further to the next countries. We have no coming back date. Our plan is no plan at all 🙂

I’ve already been working fully remotely for 1 month. So far so good 😎

Summary

I know that everyone has his/her own lifestyle and I don’t want to encourage you to do the same what I did. However I encourage you to not be afraid of taking serious decisions in your life. Stop caring about other people’s opinions – you have only one life and no one will live it through for you 🙂

I’m just an ordinary guy who wanted to change his life and managed to do so with some work and appropriate attitude. I think that everyone deserves a life he/she wants to have. If you’re motivated enough and ready for hard work, you can achieve a lot. Just do it! 😉

If you want to stay up-to-date with our traveling and remote working adventures, I invite you to follow us on Instagram and our traveling blog – for now, it’s only in Polish, but we hope to add English captions to our feed photos soon.

Have you ever worked remotely? Did you connect it with traveling? Maybe you have some digital nomads spots to recommend in Europe or Asia? Share your thoughts in the comments! 🙂