How to travel the world while freelancing as a programmer | Hacker News Reader

How to travel the world while freelancing as a programmer

bkpk.me

16 pointsashray14 comments

Seriously, what's with the adverts on that website? I get a pop-under, multiple flash banners, and in general it slows my work PC to a crawl.

I can imagine this guy is making more money from adverts than from freelancing...

Author here. Really ? :( I didn't think the ads were intrusive because they're set to not run any popups. That website doesn't make any money, well, it makes like 20 cents a day but I don't think that counts.. :S

I remember there was a post on HN a few weeks ago about how devs using macs is causing serious usability issues. I think I just got bitten by that :S I'll try and boot up Virtualbox and look into it. Sorry for the bad ads.

popup on linux also. is 20 cents/day really worth the ux mess?

No it's not and I would fix that given the chance. I just wish people wouldn't flag this down. Infact, it should be fixed now.

I just opened and read the piece on your site, I did not find the ads intrusive (any more, perhaps?) nor did I get a pop-up/pop-under advertisement.

But, the site is still massively resourceful - Firefox, at least, is having massive troubles rendering the site. Scrolling is really painful - smoothly with a scrollwheel or with up/down keys.

I havn't tried to debug the site, but I thought the above might be of interest to you anyhow.

I'm on Firefox 13.0.1, running Ubuntu on a Intel i5 first-gen.

Now you've toned down the ads a bit, I've given this an upvote, but I suspect it's too late for this submission.

I flagged it for just that reason. I don't come to HN to get directed to forced dialogue boxes and pop-ups, and leaving junk like this up is a disservice to everyone.

Well, I would think that allowing me to fix the issue would be nicer so that everyone can actually benefit from a potentially useful/inspiring article.

But hey, sorry you had to look at a popup.

What antennas do you use for connecting in each country? I'm a programmer working remotely primarily, but would like to start doing it while travelling around the world. Would love to chat with you more. Do most countries have stupid issues with multiple internet network types such as in the US, or can any 3G modem work in most places? And is 3G enough? I find I'm mostly comfortable with around 7 Mb/s down, 3Mb up

I use my iPhone 4S and tether it to my laptop. Most countries do have different frequency bands but an iPhone or newer Android will work just fine.

7Mb/s down and 3Mb up would be too much to expect off 3G. Even over Wifi in many countries, that would be too much. You could realistically expect about 2Mb/s down, but this really varies from country to country.

3G is enough for keeping track of things, pushing changes to github, uploading a few facebook pictures, etc. You can't really do much more than that without wifi. But thankfully that's available almost everywhere!

For my remote job, I need to have daily skype conferences with up 4 people.. have you found that you can use skype reliably over these 3G connections, or is that something that you haven't really done much?

I've used skype over 3G. Infact, I've used skype with video over 3G as well. However, a 4-way Skype over 3G is probably very difficult in most countries (but hey, choose Japan and South Korea and you should be able to 16-way skype on their mobile internet ;)).

What I'm trying to say is that you could move to Brazil, rent an apartment with a 10 Meg line, and carry on with your work. I know a day trader (he calls himself the wandering trader..) who did exactly that.

Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

Any issues with the Visas? I guess you can't stay more than certain amount of time in most countries, right?

Also, what about health insurance?

I usually travel on tourist visas but it's easy enough to apply for visas up to 90 days in each country. Most of these visas are extendible for the same duration exactly once. Of-course it varies from country to country. But 90 days gives me plenty of time to see a lot in most smaller countries.

Health insurance is usually issued for 6 months and travel health insurance ends up costing me about $130 per six months and this does not include treatment in the US (I'm not traveling in the US so it doesn't matter to me..).

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