Leaving (my engineering job), Launching (my own startup), Departing (the country)
The last month has been dramatic. Hell, the ones leading up to all of this were bonkers too, but this past month in particular has been momentous. I left my engineering job at a tech startup, I started studying at the Recurse Center (RC), my team and I received our incorporation papers for our startup, and I bought several flights to try out the digital nomad lifestyle after my time at RC.
I had no idea what to expect when I started at Metric Collective over a year and a half ago. I was mainly excited that a company had enough faith in me to hire me as their eighth employee and second engineer. I got the opportunity to learn and build with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met and share in the triumphs (woooo one of our businesses, FranchiseHelp, was #244 on Inc’s list of fastest growing companies) and speed bumps (still sorry I messed up all our DNS records before even coming into work one day). It was a hell of a ride, but I could tell I was plateauing due to a lack of fundamentals and greater perspective about code.
Thankfully I was accepted to the Recurse Center, a retreat for software developers. Unlike most of the bootcamps out there, RC has no curriculum and is totally self-directed. I’m just starting my fourth week, but I’m already disappointed I only have eight weeks left. This fantastic community has facilitated and supported my development on all sorts of topics — image processing, machine learning, data structures, algorithms, contributing to open source projects, and self-awareness as a developer (expect more posts on all of these topics!). I couldn’t imagine a greater place to be a curious developer.
Outside of RC I’ve been focusing my time on BuoyUp as a co-founder and CTO. BuoyUp’s goal is to lower the friction to donating and learning about charities. Our initial iteration will be a chrome extension that will automatically highlight the names of nonprofits on every page and offer additional efficacy information when users hover over the highlighted charity name. Users can donate money via our extension each time they click on a highlighted charity. We want to help you donate say $.30 with a few clicks and move on with your life. It shouldn’t be so hard to do good.
We ironed out a bunch of legal documents and received our incorporation papers this past month, and we’re releasing within the next month! Please sign up for our newsletter on our site to stay tuned.
Since leaving my job, I’m prioritizing BuoyUp and filling in my gaps as an engineer. It was incredibly convenient that I could do all of it from anywhere. Ever since I came across NomadList (a great resource for cost of living as a nomad in foreign cities), I haven’t been able to get over the idea of living abroad and working remotely. Based on cost of living, I should be able to live abroad for a fraction of what I pay to live in NYC (duh), so I’ll be freelancing and working on side projects for at least a year while I travel! I start in Spain/Portugal this fall, continue to Thailand this winter, and I’m winging it from there.
There will be way more posts to come on all of this, and I’d love some company if you feel like joining my travels. Though I’m not quite ready to leave NYC, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than what I get to do for the next year or two.
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Thanks for reading. Comment below with any topics you’d like to hear about. To Read About My Travel Plans: Upcoming Travel Destinations & My Vague Plan as a Digital Nomad
