Where are you from?
Israel
What do you do?
Self employed programmer and manager. Working at Meteor on the Apollo team. The founder of The Guild. Guitar player and former teacher.
How are you nomadic?
I own only 30 things and they all fit in my backpack (except my electric guitar which has a case of it’s own). I don’t rent a place and I haven’t stayed in one country more than 2 months in the past 4 years.
What’s your favorite part of being a nomad?
Having very low monthly expenses. The fact that I know that if something will happen and I wouldn’t want to/couldn’t work, nothing bad will happen. That security feeling gives me a lot of freedom. It also makes me love the things that I do more because I don’t do them to feel safe, just because I want to do them. It also helps me clear away a lot of bullshit that comes to work - meetings, commuting, updating, etc… if it’s not efficient or fun to me, I just don’t do it.
What’s your least favorite part?
Being away from my girlfriend (it’s just until she’ll finish studying but it’s still the hardest thing). Feeling lonely with that sense of freedom. I hope that will change when my girlfriend will get back to travel with me.
Being away from friends and family. It’s very easy to be next to nice people when you travel, making friends. But then you move on. Then you miss them and what to spend time next to them. New people you meet don’t cover that need and with time it’s even annoying to meet new people when all you want is to spend more time with the people you already know and love.
Working with people who don’t know what they want. Then they need you to be more present and tell them what to do and that takes time. I like working with people who know what they want and just do it. They don’t need management or conversations.
What’s your craziest story?
The reason I started all of this was just because of a bag. I was working in New York with you (@richlitt) 🙂 and this other amazing Australian dude. Then one day he started coming to work with this really cool bag that looked like a turtle shell (cote & ciel). I just looked at this bag and decided instantly that I’m going to buy one and live with everything just in this bag. And a month later, that was exactly what happened.
What’s next for you?
For the past 2 years I’ve been working part time at Meteor Development Group. Probably the best company to work with in the world for me. I’m doing a lot of open source work there around GraphQL which I’m very excited about.
But I’m not really sure about my grand vision anymore. I accomplished a lot of personal goals I had in the past 4 years. Biggest one was having a relationship like I have with my girlfriend but many other things (doing meaningful open source work, traveling around the world, speaking in conferences, doing music again, working with people who are smarter then me and that I can call my friends, etc..) So now I’m actually pretty lost. I’m not sure what’s the next big thing I should do…. I would love some ideas 🙂