For a year I experienced truly “remote” work.

From Summer 2024 to Fall 2025, I spent a year traveling across Peru, Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, and almost half a year living in a van in New Zealand.

During this time, I worked remotely at CloudMosa as the Head of Developer Relations for Cloud Phone. Although my interest in flip phones began in 2020 when I launched PodLP, this was quite the departure from the past 5+ years in Big Tech living in Seattle. This writing is part of the long journey to unpack and make meaning from such a profound experience.

Aotearoa New Zealand 🇳🇿 #

Isolation, postcard-quality sunsets, striking mountains, flightless birds, solid 4G signal, and the kindest people I’ve ever met

I’ve worked with Hugo (the static site generator) for years. This blog is built with Hugo, and so is Cloud Phone for Developers. Coincidentally, our van also came with the name “Hugo!” Fortunately, Hugo survived another 10,000km around the North & South Islands, and thanks to an Asus 4G-AX56 (powered by rooftop solar), I had WiFi wherever I went using the Spark network.

A 12-hour flight from San Francisco: New Zealand has no dangerous animals, no land borders, and it’s often omitted from maps. I’ve been to dark-sky preserves, but New Zealand is on another level. This is just a several second exposure on an iPhone 13 Mini.

Run by the Department of Conservation (DOC), New Zealand’s Great Walks were one of the initial draws to visit the islands. Of the 11 Great Walks, I completed 4 and hiked partway across another 5. In between tramping trips I dropped by the Nelson Dev Group and gave a talk at Ruby Nights Auckland. I launched the Cloud Phone for Developers website, was a guest on the WasmAssembly Podcast, and helped launch the MyGP app for Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest telecommunication company.

No doubt, New Zealand is weird. It’s home to hobbits, alpine parrots, spherical concretions, and Steampunk HQ. I saw the world’s smallest penguins and walked up the world’s steepest street. I tried Amazake, witnessed glowworms, got into F45, and picked up a few Māori phrases.

I drove on the left, lived in other people’s homes (house sitting), and had my first run-in with rites of passage where this poems came to life.

The Breeze At Dawn

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth
across the threshold
where the two worlds meet.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep!

A Great Wagon, by Rumi

This was definitely a departure from riding the corporate shuttle, responding to hundreds of Workplace messages, and providing status updates at the semi-annual All Hands meeting. In many ways, I was now confronted with the paradox of choice.

Maya Angelou wrote that, “people will never forget how you made them feel.” I will never forget the feeling of being as far as humanly possible from the culture of busyness. The feeling when ducks and weka were my only coworkers. The feeling when projects were punctuated by a swim in a brisk alpine lake.

It’s more than just the question: “live to work or work to live?” The balance between under and overworked isn’t a fixed point. In Safi Bahcall’s book Loonshots, he attempts to quantify the conditions under which return-on-politics exceeds return-on-work. At larger companies, I’ve observed the primary motivation was compensation, and the primary form of communication was meetings. Being truly “remote” at CloudMosa, meetings were rare and the driving force I saw was the satisfaction of seeing your work help real people.

OMGOSH !
OMGOSH !
OMGOSH !
THANK YOU FOR THE LINK TO PATRICK MADRID!
YOU ARE AMAZING, TOTALLY MADE MY LIFE (ESP BC I AM HOMELESS RIGHT NOW) SO MUCH MORE OF A HAPPY PLACE TO BE. . .
I HOPE SOMEONE DOES THE SAME FOR YOU,IN WHICHEVER WAY YOU WISH. . . .
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME
P.S. CANT WAIT TO GET TO DOWNLOAD THEM IN 2 WEEKS, MUUUWAH.

– Anonymous PodLP User

This was an email a user sent me. Five years ago, I built PodLP because it was something I wanted myself. I continued building it for the same reason that CloudMosa builds Cloud Phone. PodLP turned into an (admittedly small) business that continues to this day.

Although sponsorship revenue keeps PodLP profitable, no doubt I won’t look back and smile at every invoice. But I’ll never forget unsolicited feedback like this.

The next chapter: rest of world #

Rest of world (ROW) is a pejorative commonly used at technology companies to mean everywhere outside of the US and Europe. I spent several weeks in each country, experiencing them more deeply than a typical American vacation but not to the same extent as New Zealand. Each place shaped my understanding of the world in ways I hadn’t expected.

Australia 🇦🇺 #

Marsupials, meetups, speed cameras, and a sausage on election day

Growing up, I loved Zoboomafoo so naturally I was excited to visit the country full of strange animals. Yet it was I who felt watched by the insane speed enforcement cameras. After spending 6 months in small towns, it was jarring to return to large cities, many more populous than the entire country of New Zealand.

I’m grateful to Frontenders Sydney for offering me the opportunity to present to 100+ developers, and for our hosts in Brisbane who prepared a classic Aussie Barbie (and so much more). Plus Australia is where I discovered Jack Davies and The Bush Chooks at a last minute concert.

I’d love to see America adopt the democracy sausage, and aspire to the return of politics summed up as “boring” and “weird”. Yet I’m not called to return to Australia. Maybe it’s the lack of prominent mountains, or abundance of deadly creatures. Maybe it’s because I don’t surf, or because I’m not interested in their $1500 coffee. Or perhaps it felt a bit too much like the parts of home that I’d rather avoid.

Vietnam 🇻🇳 #

Gastronomic excellence and highly caffeinated hustle culture

Vietnam is growing fast, and it’s abundantly clear why. It’s a place of hardcore hustle culture: operating an AirBnB, restaurant, nail salon, farming durian, brewing kombucha, and driving for Grab. Although the small demographic I encountered was biased towards tourism, it seems as if everyone run a business and has 3 jobs. After all, this is a place where you can’t put too much on a moped.

Vietnam is where I bought my first Cloud Phone in person, a Viettel V1S 4G for ₫390,000 (~$15 USD). I also saw real people using feature phones for practical purposes, not just as part of a “digital detox.” CloudMosa also donated 100 4G Cloud Phones to provide connectivity to residents in remote areas of Vinh Long province.

If America runs on Dunkin, Vietnam runs on Highland. You can’t escape their strong, sugary drinks. Nor should you. Vietnamese coffee is delicious and its how everyone keeps going day and night.

Outside of the cities, Vietnam’s karst landscapes are stunning. Limestone towers jut out of nowhere, and rice terraces sprawl as far as the eye can see. Yet the price of progress goes beyond caffeine addiction. Like anywhere growing quickly, smog (especially in Hanoi) and serious litter pollution is common. Venture slightly off the beaten path and the ocean hardly looks safe to swim.

Thailand 🇹🇭 #

Mangosteen, meditation, and mud houses

My time in Thailand was intentionally slow. I enjoyed mangosteen-shaped ice cream (my favorite fruit), joined a yoga retreat, and took impromptu lessons on how to build houses out of clay bricks. As Lao Tzu put it, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” While I raced from rice paddy to museum to coffee stand to hawker market in Vietnam, I reconnected and recalibrated in Chiang Mai and Bangkok.

India 🇮🇳 #

Rick Steves’ favorite and the “keypad mobile” capital

Although my time was spent in Kerala (often billed as “India Lite”), it was still quite intense. But this was one of those times when I thrived on the chaos. I roamed the streets of Kochi by rickshaw and public transport: buses, trains, and even ferries. I even found plenty of my beloved mangosteen.

When asked my favorite country, I say, “India.” While I enjoy the shock value of saying that, that’s not why I say it. I say India because it’s true. India wallops anyone’s self-assuredness. India rearranged my cultural furniture. My confidence that I understood such basics to life as time, joy, love, pain, and music was shaken. I was humbled in a way that made me a better person.
– Rick Steves

Much to the chagrin of many a mobile store salesperson, I had no interest in the latest Huawei Mate or iPhone. Eventually I bought what you can’t find on eBay: feature phones (mostly called “keypad mobiles” in India) like a Snexian Guru 4G and one of the very first Cloud Phone models, an Itel Super Guru 4G.

Europe #

A wedding in the United Kingdom kicked off the next phase of my trip, including visits with family and in-person meetings with developers in Germany and the Netherlands. Then it was back to the unfamiliar.

Switzerland 🇨🇭 #

Charming and alarmingly expensive

Switzerland is quaint, peaceful, and anything but flat. It’s a place where you’re not wanting for views, where trains arrive to the minute, and a $10 lunch no longer exists. Once again I followed Rick Steves’ advice and visited Gimmelwald. While the cozy vibes were welcome during a very rainy summer, what made it special was meeting locals on the train who invited us for tea.

During a downpour, Heinz and Annelies recounted their own travels decades earlier during an era when visa applications were made in paper and travelers cheques were still in fashion. By comparison, my own journey was far less harrowing. Agonizing or not, my journey was my own. The world has clearly changed in half a century, and I’m fortunate to be able to be put to productive use anywhere I can secure a somewhat stable internet connection.

The hikes throughout Lauterbrunnen and the Alps were incredible, but taking a series of gondolas and trains up several thousand meters feels like cheating. Hard work that leads to a sense of accomplishment is motivating. It’s more than just the IKEA effect.

Surprisingly, a last minute hike to Chilchbalm proved more memorable. It’s an awesome glacial basin, and one of the view places outside of National Parks like Glacier and the Grand Tetons that I truly felt small.

Italy 🇮🇹 #

La vita è bella

Some say, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Others believe that, “life happens while you’re busy making other plans.” As a Technical Program Manager (TPM), you’re expected to have Plans A through E for when the inevitable goes wrong.

The White Madonna Festival was one of those unplanned highlights that I only learned about day of thanks to flyers on the street. Hiking the Cinque Terre was incredible. So was swimming in the Ligurian Sea and eating lemon gelato in Corniglia. But neither rival the unplanned nighttime visit to the Grotto of Lord Byron celebrating a 14th century plague miracle by lighting more than 2,000 roman candles.

The rest of Italy (namely Rome) was impressive, but I had high expectations that couldn’t be exceeded by the dense crowds, sweltering heat, and fear of pickpockets. I was also perplexed by WhatsBar, a 24-hour snack vending machine and ATM in Ravenna that appears to combine the names and logos of WhatsApp and the Java programming language.

Romania 🇷🇴 #

A more rugged and affordable Switzerland

Romania was a sleeper hit and another last minute decision. It came on my radar because I met a Romanian at a tech meetup in Auckland. That’s all the planning, and it turned out to be incredible.

After reconnecting with my Romanian acquaintance on WhatsApp, I learned it’s best to hike in groups because of the prevalence of brown bears. Although no bears were on this hike, it proved to be sound advice for making friends. Plus, I did eventually see bears.

Cyprus 🇨🇾 #

Adorable cats and a return to building

Cyprus was a place I had no connection to. I’m still not quite sure what drew me there. But the intense daytime heat let me feel less guilty spending time inside building my hackathon project, Backyard Birds, in between sampling wines and visits to ancient ruins.

It turns out Cyprus cats have ruled the island for over 10,000 years since they were apparently brought from Egypt to eradicate snakes. They’re are so cute, I made a montage video of the many cats I encountered.

As a software engineer, there’s a sense of excitement and pride seeing your work in the real world. I am often asked by folks in Africa and South Asia why I work on flip phones when they’re mostly for seniors and hipsters in the west. This flyer for the iPRO K2 running KaiOS was probably the first time I encountered an advertisement for KaiOS in real life.

From the data, I knew my work reached far flung places. Five and a half years after launch, PodLP has active listeners in over 170+ countries including Cyprus! Despite a $0 marketing budget, PodLP still gets organically mentions and linked on podcasts in places where it’s most popular like India.

I have no personal connection to this poster, it’s just sage advice.

Türkiye 🇹🇷 #

Cats, cats, and more cats

The final stop on my year-long adventure was Turkey, where I experienced life in a different set of rhythms like waking up to the morning adhan (call to prayer) and greeting the local cats. Following their successful invasion of Cyprus, cats conquered Istanbul where they remain in charge to this day.

With some spare time and an extended deadline, I decided to work on another submission for the Yoto Hackathon: Fez the Cat. Clearly inspired by my time in Istanbul, Fez tells 26 stories, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each story is almost a pangram, a sequence that containers every letter of the alphabet from A-Z. Except each story is missing one letter which the listener has to guess.

Fez gave me more time to explore vibe coding and tinker with text-to-speech (TTS) voices in ElevenLabs. Backyard Birds and Fez the Cat were the start of a return to building that continues by hacking at Sundai Club and open sourcing many of my projects over the past few years.

Returning Home #

It’s a strange and disorienting feeling returning home after being away for so long. This post is just one part of processing the journey. I still have much to unfold on the nature of work, the call to wander, and the meaning of “home.” But for now I’m intent on building something new that I can feel proud of.