I'm moving to Bali!
It’s now official, I’m moving to Bali the 20th of August, 2018 ✈️
As I announced recently, I decided to work part-time on my open-source project Gladys 👨🏼💻. In the other part-time, I’m going to work as a freelancer as a back-end Engineer (hire me!). This new life allows me to be location independant, and to choose where I want to live.
My story
When I was studying engineering, I was in a small city located 1h in the north of Paris, Compiègne. This city is small, and have lots of advantages when you are a student:
- Rent is cheap: I was paying 300€/month for a crazy 90m2 appartment with 2 roomates, center of the city, big rooms with queen bed, big living rooms with 4 sofas, two bathrooms, 2 balcony so you can eat outside, inside car park, elevator, all included!
- Cost of life is cheap: With our engineering school, we had some pretty good deals, like 33cl of Belgium beer for 1€50, or vegetables food pack for 35€/5 weeks of organic food coming from local producers.
When I moved to Paris for work after that, I realized that life is not really the same as in Compiègne…
- Renting an appartement is more like 1000€/month for something decent
- A bad beer is 5/7€, and a good belgium beer is more something like 6/10€. Yes, 10€ for a beer!
On top of that, life is not that much more fun. You need to commute to go to work. Often, the metro is broken and you get delayed. Spending 45 minutes 2 times a day in a metro full of people sweating is not something fun, you are just wasting your time.
So I decided that Paris was not the city I wanted to live in today 😄
The Nomad movement
Since a couple of years, I’m following the Nomad movement and some famous Nomads like @levelsio and @JohnONolan.
Being nomad means being location independant and living from where you want in the world!
Pieter Levels created a website, NomadList.com, that allows you to compare lots of cities around the world. You can compare cost of life, weather, air quality, proximity of beach, safety, fun, internet quality, and hundreds of other criterias.
I compared a few cities, did some research, and…. found these awesome pictures of Bali 😄
Crazy, no ? 😀
This is where I want to go for my first destination 😍
Cost of life is definitely cheaper than in France, and there are some crazy coworking space where you can work from, like Dojo Bali:
Dojo Bali have six optic fiber lines for redundancy, and their website claims 300Mbps fast internet with 99,98% uptime. It may not be that in real life as you are not alone on the Wi-Fi, but still it’s pretty good for a developing country.
And Dojo Bali is located in Canggu, just near the beach 🏝
Perfect!
What’s next for me
As I was saying in my article on Gladys Patreon, my current contract as Lead Backend Engineer at BulldozAIR ends the 16th of August 2018.
The 20th of August, I’m flying to Indonesia ✈️
I’m going to take at least 3 weeks of holidays at first, to take the time to breathe after these crazy years of work. In the last 3 years, the longest holidays I had was 10 days off, and even, I was not fully disconnecting each time with my work on Gladys. Off-time is really important for both mental and physical health, so here I’ll be fully disconnected during my holidays to relax and empty my brain 😊 My friends are even coming with me the first 2 weeks to visit Indonesia with me!
I know this time away from my computer will boost my creativity and my energy, and I can’t wait to be back at work on Gladys from Bali after holidays 🤘
FAQ
How do you handle Visa ?
When you arrive at the airport in Indonesia, you can register for a 30 days Visa On Arrival (VOA) renewable one time.
So, after 60 days in the country, you have to leave the country and come back.
So I’ll just have to travel to other places at least once every 2 months.
My first visa-run is going to be in Singapor, I will be there 4 days at the end of October.
And your home automation setup ?
This is the first question I get when I’m talking about this project of moving to Asia! 😛
Of course I’m bringing my Raspberry Pi, some sensors and some connected stuff!
Don’t worry!
No more Gladys talks in France ?
Most of my communication is online on Twitter/Mailing list/Gladys community/Discord, so on that point it won’t change. I’m even doing more and more calls with the community, and being remote won’t change that.
But sometimes, true, doing physical events is better.
The world is small, flights are not so expensive when you have no constraints and when you schedule your flights in advances!
Sooo… I already have my ticket back to France for Christmas 2018!
I’m definitely planning to do some Gladys talks in France in end 2018, if I find some schools/Fablabs/companies to host the events of course!
My goal is really to group Gladys events when I’m back in France to see my family or do some administrative stuff.
Are you escaping French taxes ?
Noooo 😂
My company is a french company and all taxes I pay are paid in France.
Traveling around the world doesn’t change anything about that.
How long are you going to stay in Bali ?
I’m going to stay at least 4 months in Bali, then in December I’ll be back in France a couple of weeks.
In January, I’m planning to move to Thailand. Bangkok & Chiang Mai seems to be nice cities for digital nomads and it’s the best season in Thailand to travel here.
My nomad lifestyle has no scheduled end 😉
In closing
It’s always been a dream for me to go traveling full-time, and it’s now a reality!
I’m going to share as much as I can on this blog about my journey as a nomad!
I’m convinced that traveling, discovering new cultures and meeting new people is going to be good for my creativity and will improve my productivity.
I can’t wait to be on the plane to Indonesia 😱
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