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FEATURE

Coding in Paradise

Co-Working for Programmers

Issue: 17.3 (May/June 2019)
Author: Glen Newbury
Author Bio: Glen is a web developer and occasional Xojo programmer who lives on Toronto Island with his wife Elana and three cats. He aspires to one day being competent with Xojo.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 21,028
Starting Page Number: 23
Article Number: 17003
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Excerpt of article text...

My wife Elana and I were waiting for a ferry on a cold October afternoon with our friend Louise when one of us asked her what she was doing for the winter. She said "I'm going to Cuenca, Ecuador. I've rented an apartment outside of town for $250 a month."

Louise lives on her sailboat boat during the summer, but come late October the boats get hauled and she spends the winter traveling, house sitting, and visiting grandchildren. After talking to Louise about Cuenca for the ten-minute ferry ride, my wife and I looked at each other, somewhat stunned, and said "We could do that!"

To give some background, we live in a small car-free community on an island ten minutes by ferry to Toronto, Canada. I used to have an agency that specialized in automated design production of catalogs and flyers with the aid of an object-oriented language (Frontier, and when that wasn't supported any longer, Applescript). When print started to wane, the economies of scale eventually meant I was better off working at home doing web development, print design, and a bit of programming.

I also program in Xojo as a hobby: some of us may have met a few years ago at the Xojo Vegas conference. My wife owns a brick and mortar gift boutique and also sells her products on-line with a Shopify website.

Anyway, by the next day, I was researching flights and Airbnbs and that winter we spent three weeks in Cuenca. Then the next two winters we spent about two months each year in South East Asia. Usually we'd rent Airbnbs or stay at small hotels. When away, we still try to work pretty much regular hours so whether we're away or at home our work responsibilities don't suffer, but occasionally we'll have a short getaway trip like caving in Vietnam or treehouse-camping in Laos.

We had a great few winters doing this, but we did find some downsides. One is there can be little social life. Two winters we rented an incredible teak house near Chiang Rai, Thailand, and the only people we had to talk to besides each other were the Thai couple looking after the house, who had limited English.

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