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My story

Early days

Born in 1985, I lived a fairly normal live up until highschool where everything started to come off the rails. The education system tried to force me into a mold I didn't fit into which clashed with everything I am. I have created frustrations for more than a few teachers and employers just for 'thinking differently'. As a result I quit school early to pursue my own goals. Since then I have worked for several companies in various tech related jobs before starting out on my own and doing webdevelopment full time in 2012 - I turned my long time hobby into my job. So far it's working out pretty well.

Doing the minimalist thing

During the 2010's I became increasingly dissatisfied with the European Union and their overbearing nonsense and finally figured out I wasn't going to be happy if I stayed for much longer. Worn out by rising costs, poor weather, peoples ignorance, illegal immigrants and many more frustrations I felt that I had to make some drastic changes to my life. After nearly bankrupting myself with a brick and mortar business in 2014 I had enough.

I spent almost a year preparing for the next phase of my life, something more enjoyable. This started with cutting ties with anything I didn't care for. This included selling pretty much all of my belongings. Being free and unburdened, I have turned into a bit of a minimalist. The few things I owned pretty much fitted in a large backpack and a messenger bag and I quickly discovered that this works very well for me. The few things I owned were much more valuable to me, and are more carefully weighed if I should have them at all. On top of that, I found new things to do and learned to leave behind a lot of other things and habits. As a result, my life tends to be simpler, but at the same time my nomadic lifestyle brings a whole new set of challenges.

Moving to Southeast Asia and back

In late 2015, having prepared everything there is to prepare for, I moved to the Philippines. I flew to Manila on October 1st, arriving the next morning. For the first few months I stayed in a touristic town called Puerto Galera to get my bearings and get over the first culture shock. I then moved south to Iloilo City and later on to Bacolod to sort of end up in Dumaguete City on Negros Island. Where I stayed for almost 3 years. Meanwhile I have explored a lot of the country and have been on most larger islands and some smaller ones.

In late 2018 it was time to do a so-called visa run. This amounts to leaving the country for a few days to get a new visa when I get back. For this little vacation I choose to go to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. There I discovered, much to my frustration, what a underdeveloped country the Philippines really is. Seeing a more developed country for the first time in years I suddenly realized how low I sunk in my living standards and the daily frustrations I had to deal with. Malaysia was a huge eye-opener in that regard and after returning to the Philippines it quickly became apparent that something had to change yet again.

After some contemplating I left the Philippines for Southern Europe with the idea to roam around there for a bit and finally to secure a visa for Mexico.

To Mexico and...

The plan was to stay in Spain for a few months to recharge and plan the next move, unfortunately the reverse culture-shock of Europe was so great I skipped Spain completely. As planned I spent a few weeks in Italy where I visited Rome, Venice, Pisa and finally ended up in Milan where I got on a train to the Netherlands. Back 'home' I applied for my Mexican Visa, and in early 2019 I moved to Mexico. From the Mexican embassy I did manage to get a permit to apply for a Temporary Resident visa. Unfortunately while I was waiting for the residency status the world kind of ended.

The world quickly descended into *social dysfunction* and the *Chinese Flu* spreading like wildfire made things even worse. The government especially moved extremely slow. After a year of 'processing' I finally got my resident card. Anxious to get on with life I bought a motorcycle in January 2021. This allowed me to finally explore more of the country on my own terms. A plan was made to go cross-country to La Paz in Baja California Sur, and I spent almost 4 months driving there.

After having explored Quintana Roo for the last 2 years I couldn't wait to get out of there and finally see Mexico. By now I've since visited most states in Mexico twice and visited a lot of cities and towns, riding more than 55000 kilometers on my motorcycle just in Mexico.

Going against all advises to stick to main roads, I picked smaller roads and rarely use the 'safe' toll roads. So far, so good!

Will code for Tacos

Since 2012 I have been a full time freelance webdeveloper. During the first few months I spent most of my time on making a more professional website and turning some WordPress plugins into paid products. Usually I'm working on something WordPress or WooCommerce related. But along the way I've also been busy with a custom search engine for Torrent downloads, I've tried my hand at plugins for games like MineCraft and Endless Sky and some other stuff.

I always work online and while travelling that's just convenient. As long as I have internet I can do some work and pay for whatever I'm doing. I guess that makes me something of a Digital Nomad. But I'm not all that Digital. Just being a Nomad is enough for me. I don't follow the hype and never visited a co-working space like those hipster types you see on YouTube. I rather focus on doing my own thing and keep my identity.
I maintain a growing library of plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce and ClassicPress such as AdRotate and AdRotate Pro. And I sell a bunch of smaller plugins for WooCommerce and bbPress.

I know PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS and a bit of JavaScript. Among other things.

I've been making WordPress plugins since about 2005, back when WordPress 1.5.2 was hip and cool. Before that I attempted to make my own Content Management System. And did odd jobs for local businesses. At the time I wasn't sure where I wanted to be with web-development and had a regular day-job. On the side I've been doing on-demand network administator work for a few people. I've used and maintained Soekris hardware with pfSense or Monowall and made sure routing, VPN, load balancing, Wifi and firewalls would work as intended. File sharing services and home streaming servers often were part of the action.