Why to become a digital nomad
I’ve been working in IT business for 10+ years in Oulu, Finland. During the last few years I’d been thinking what I’d like to do during the next 10 years or so and what would be beneficial for me as an IT professional, but also as a person. I had many different dreams and plans, but I guess I was waiting for some external turn of events to push me into some direction. Well, in the end I grew tired of waiting and about one year a go I set few targets for myself and decided to reach them.
I also realised I didn’t really like the idea of staying in Oulu permanently anymore. Don’t get me wrong, the summer time is quite good there and also the winter can be nice when the snow has landed and it’s not too cold. It’s the dark fall and cold winter times which I don’t find that inspiring. Could it be possible to arrange my life and work so that I could travel in different countries throughout the year?
A while back I made a mistake and read few articles about digital nomadism and it seemed like an interesting way of living. So now when I’m in a unique situation and have certain freedom I decided to seize the opportunity and try out if the digital nomad way of living suits for me. My plan is to travel slowly – by staying for at least a month in every location – which should make it possible to do some work and live with reasonable budget.
Work
Maybe the biggest challenge was – and still is – the work. I’ve been doing project management and scrum master jobs for the last few years and I was an embedded software designer before that, but those are all sports you cannot really do on the road. I really liked my job – even if it was quite demanding – but now it’s time to learn something new.
During the high school and university studies I was a hobbyist web developer. Also for the last two years I worked as a scrum master in a web development team. Even if I didn’t do actual coding I had the opportunity to follow – and also participate in certain tasks – how the web development is done these days so I have good high level understanding about it. I also know quite a bit about technical, process and management challenges related to web development. Currently my target is to become a web developer, but I wouldn’t mind if I got a chance to do some scrum mastering, project management or agile process development at some point. And who knows…it’s also possible to do mobile application or game development remotely.
Near future
So I started my own company – Code Verde – few months back and I’m a private entrepreneur now. I’m young (at heart) and healthy solo traveller and right now it feels like the world is my oyster ;). I don’t know where this path is leading exactly and I’m fine with that. I try to avoid over planning for the moment to keep various options open. I ended up renting out my apartments and heading to Lisbon. Why Lisbon? Mostly due to affordable cost of living, warm weather, manageable timezone difference to Finland, good transportation connections and active freelancer / entrepreneur / coworking scene.
Thats about it for now, thanks for reading this far! I’ll try to write a post a week from now on so stay tuned. Exquisite Friday afternoon for you all!
