letter from me to an aspiring “digital nomad”

Hey < Friend >,

Sorry for the late response, its nice to hear that you are looking into the “digital nomad” lifestyle. I’ll try my best to answer your questions, but I want to start by saying that you should just do it :) I was overthinking a lot before starting this journey, thinking about all the possible things that could go wrong. But since these are all new experiences, the only way to answer these questions for yourself is to try it.

Anyways, I graduated UCLA with a Mathematics/Programming degree, and went into the field of computer vision engineering after school. I interned at NASA for 3 months and then worked at the autonomous driving division of HERE maps for about 1 year, working mostly in C++ and python. I was doing some side projects in 3D computer graphics using three.js, and started getting pretty interested in the field of computer graphics because it combined my artistic and math skills.

The first few months of traveling, I was taking it easy and working on some personal projects/ doing more adventurous trips. Around March this year, I started applying for remote jobs. I tried Upwork, but didn’t like it because the pay was minimal and the projects were very short term. I was looking for something long term, so I decided to just apply to startups as a normal applicant on AngelList. I was lucky to find an augmented reality company based in SF that was open to hiring remote workers, and have been working with them doing AR graphics related things for the last 6 months.

I started because I was friends with a great group of people in San Francisco who began following this digital nomad entrepreneur named Pieter Levels (you should google him if you haven’t heard of him already). We had a lot of conversations about the subject, and started questioning why we follow the system, commuting to our 9–5 day jobs just to work on the same computer we have at home. I felt like there has to be another way to live, and theres no better time than now to try it. I remember reassuring myself that “it’s just an experiment”, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always come home and get back into the SF lifestyle.

I don’t really wish I had known any of the negative things when I started, because then maybe I wouldn’t have started this experience. So I guess I wish I had known that I can adapt to new things better than I thought. Oh, also that Charles Schwab debit cards refund all foreign ATM fees ( amazing ).

One of the best experiences was probably meeting a very cool live coding (music) community in Bogota, Colombia, and doing a small performance myself after taking a course there. Another awesome experience was doing a bike trip from Mexico City to Guatemala City.

Worst experiences.. I guess the general sadness that happens sometimes when you feel alone in new cities. Integrating into new cities is difficult, but the challenge is interesting / makes you learn something about yourself.

So, hope that answered everything, let me know if you have any other questions!

Best,

Sneha