![]() I lived in Palm Springs for a month at a corporate condo no one was using during the baking summer. I was able to stay with friends and family, used airbnb, and sometimes splurged on hotels. A little over two years ago I gave up my apartment, sold almost everything, put some stuff in storage, and took off on my motorcycle. With my kids growing up and moving out I had fewer reasons to stay in Portland, or to stay anywhere. I was living in Portland and happy to just work from home, but I wanted to travel more. ![]() With a steady income I was able to live anywhere I could get an internet connection. The company needed immediate help fixing and enhancing their application, they didn’t make me work at the office, and that turned into a five-year relationship. They had fired their original developers over a contract dispute. I took a contract with a company that had a profitable and almost-working web-based business. My decision to focus on debugging and maintenance was informed by what I saw as high demand and less competition, my ability to figure out and fix legacy code, and by the increasing difficulty I encountered trying to get hired at startups, which I attribute to my age and unwillingness to work crazy hours for pizza and beer. I explained why that works for me in my article The joys of maintenance programming. It didn’t take long to build up a steady stream of work.Ībout the same time I started concentrating on fixing broken web sites and the underlying code, rather than developing new applications or sites from scratch. I got referrals from programmer friends, web site design firms, and even from recruiters. ![]() I found small web site and database projects through word of mouth, by contacting small businesses with broken web sites, by writing articles on this blog, and by presenting at local user group meetings. My comments are too long for a Twitter reply and may be interesting to people who don’t follow me on Twitter, so here goes.Īfter almost thirty years as a professional programmer working in offices and cubicle farms I started taking on freelance projects on the side, while I was still working full-time at an office job. I was asked today on Twitter about how to find work as a digital nomad. ![]()
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