Tag: Digital Nomad

  • The Joys of Backpacking

    The Joys of Backpacking

    When I stopped working a corporate job, one of the first things I started regularly doing in my ‘new found’ time was to go backpacking.  Why can’t I get enough of Backpacking?  Why do others find it so frightening?  Let me show you some potential ways to loving the many joys of backpacking.

    Initially, my main goal for experiencing the joys of backpacking was to spend time in deep nature.  Most of the hiking trails around me are very crowded (even more so since the pandemic).  Many of the people there are loud… I didn’t really want to hear others’ music and podcasts while I’m out enjoying the sounds of nature.  The crowds on the trails are often disrespectful…  I can complete a loop on a local trail, picking up trash as I go.  Often, when I return to the beginning, I could start the whole process all over again.  Honestly, who couldn’t be bothered to put their slim jim wrapper in their pocket and carry it out with them?  I noticed though, that once you get beyond ~5 miles from the start of a trail, the number of people tends to drop drastically.

    The first backpacking trip… in awhile

    There is a problem with hiking 10+ miles within the confines of daylight.  It can be problematic, especially when you factor in driving to a location, feeding yourself, etc.  I remembered the joy of spending days at a time in the woods with my friends when I was a kid and thought “why not do this again?”.  Time to pull together all my old (heavy) gear and purchase whatever else I needed to get started.  I tried convincing the rest of my family to go, but they weren’t having it.  Why not retrace a trip that I did many times when I was younger?  I thought that it would be an easy way to get started.

    It was mostly a disaster 😉 As mentioned, my 20+ year old gear was HEAVY!  Over the years, people had stopped using the woods/roads/trails in this part of Pennsylvania and everything was overgrown and borderline impassible.  Hiking uphill made me realize how out of shape I really was.  I was rusty in setting up and using my gear and just generally ill-prepared.  Even with all this, there was immense joy in how quiet things were.  Unfortunately, trash from eons ago was still there.  The sky was amazing!  When I got back home, I couldn’t wait to go again.

    Joy 1:  Backpacking is a great teacher

    After allowing my body to recover for a few days, I decided I was absolutely out of shape.  Before the next trip, I would definitely need to work on my uphill endurance and some leg/hip range of motion that I didn’t use in my normal day to day life.  It seemed that making some of my gear ‘lighter’ would also help (Did I mention that it was HEAVY?).  I also packed in a bunch of stuff that it seemed I would never use.  Why I thought I needed a frying pan, multiple cups and something to boil water in, and many changes of clothes, I have no idea.  I also did not bring other things that would have been helpful.  There was a light rain that I wasn’t really prepared for and it got surprisingly cold at night.  I started looking into upgrading some of my gear.

    Joy 2: Backpacking is great exercise

    Experiencing my defeated body after this first trip is probably what started me down the path of actually getting healthy.  I realized how when I was a kid, I did this trip easily multiple times without needing a week to recover.  I started looking into creating a plan for allowing me to be able to do that again.  This is what led me to becoming such an advocate for bodyweight based Functional Training.  Over the years, I found that this combined with a little bit of endurance training is the best way to (mostly) stay physically prepared for what backpacking will throw at you.

    As someone who constantly keeps an eye on their HRV, I’ve noticed that generally, backpacking has a positive impact on this metric.  Sure, a grueling day might tank HRV, but in my experience, HRV tends to go up dramatically while (or shortly after) backpacking.

    Joy 3: Backpacking will make you more resilient

    Sure HRV is a good metric for tracking resiliency, but backpacking helps in this regard in other ways.  Many of us in the west live in a constant state of comfort.  This is a reasonably modern human condition.  Even my grandparents had to deal with food scarcity.  Most of us are shielded from the weather and can adjust temperatures of our environment on a whim.  Our lives are packed with stuff and more ways to entertain ourselves than we could conceivably ever make use of.  When it’s just you and the few possessions you’re willing to drag with you out in the backcountry, things start to get interesting.  You hope that you didn’t forget anything crucial.  You cross your fingers that the weather will cooperate.  Roll the dice that you’ll get to a good location and setup camp before the sun goes down.

    And then it gets dark… what was that sound?  Holy shit, the moon is bright… I hope I can get some sleep tonight before I need to hike many more miles tomorrow.  Guaranteed, that on just about any trip that you take, at least one of these things (or something else) will happen.  And guess what?  You will deal with it!  Your only other option is hiking back to civilization.

    Joy 4: Backpacking makes you a better Planner

    There’s nothing like one of these “borderline disaster trips” to make you reevaluate everything.  Every failure is a potential learning experience.  Get caught by unexpected weather?  You will be sure to have some way of making sure that doesn’t happen in the future.  Setup your tent on a slope and the blood rushing into your heads makes it so you’re unable to sleep at night?  You will spend more time evaluating your placement next time.

    Something as simple as forgetting to put your headlamp around your neck or in your pocket after setting up camp will prompt you to run through scenarios in your mind ahead of time even on the next day of your current trip.  I’ve found that as I backpack more… especially solo… I go through visualization exercises in just about everything I do, imagining potential ways that things can go wrong and thinking of potential solutions ahead of time.

    Joy 5: Backpacking is great for evaluating redundancies

    You can easily go overboard with planning.  Just one mini-disaster will have you looking for new gear or solutions to prevent it from happening.  This leads to a gear explosion as you start to pack redundant methods to potentially deal with them.  Extra batteries, several different ways of creating fire, additional clothes and food… The problem is, every extra gram starts to add up.  I’ve started evaluating gear the way Alton Brown evaluates kitchen equipment… look for ‘multitaskers’ 😀 If something is only good for one thing… especially if it’s likely to be rarely used, I actively look for something else that fits the bill that can serve double duty.

    Joy 6: Backpacking will make you respect nature

    No matter how you feel about nature before your first trip, backpacking will give you a new found respect for it.  If you already love it, the first occasion where you are unprepared for the weather that Mother Nature throws at you, you will be humbled.  If you haven’t found any respect for it yet, a few hikes with others will have you well versed in the principles of Leave No Trace in no time.  After a handful of experiences in the backcountry, you’ll be able to fully relax and experience the joy of the sights and sounds that your section of the world has to offer!

    Go for a hike

    If you’ve never spent a night on trail, I hope that I convinced you to give backpacking a try.  If you’re already experienced, maybe I provided some motivation to go more frequently and/or take someone new with you.  Either way, I want to hear from you about your own personal joys of backpacking.  If you’re interested in checking out my current gear list, I maintain it here. If you need to grow/upgrade your gear collection, I have a ‘Hiking’ section on my affiliate page with some discounts.  You can always follow my backpacking (and other) adventures on instagram.  If you want to create the ultimate backpacking experience, check this out.

  • Ghost in the (Google Cloud) Shell

    One of the perks of being a technologist that is not tied to a traditional 9 to 5 is that you have immense freedom in terms of where you can complete your ‘work’ from. I’ve always toyed with the digital nomad lifestyle… but it’s kind of ridiculous when you need to lug around an insane amount of equipment in order to effectively complete your tasks. I have several computers; optimized for specific types of work, or tied to specific clients. This always required me to think ahead before traveling.  Which project I was going to work on while away?  There was a time where I would take everything with me.  Traveling with kids has definitely made me want to pack as minimally as possible.  Since I was spending a bunch of time working on the Google stack, I decided to investigate using Google Cloud Shell as a development environment.

    Problems as a Digital Nomad Developer

    Development and image processing requires horsepower.  Even the best laptops for doing this are big and heavy…. and expensive.  This is definitely something to think about if you travel.  Especially if you’re regularly in a country like India, Russia or China where in today’s political climate the likelihood of your hardware getting confiscated is higher than ever. Having this happen while traveling was what ultimately drove me to become a Chromebook advocate.

    Pros and Cons of the Chromebook

    Losing the hardware is one thing, but losing the data contained on the device is even worse. Chromebooks solved the data problem… You could powerwash the device and then restore it back to its former state at any point in time from the cloud. Worst case scenario, you lose a reasonably inexpensive piece of hardware, but your data is intact. Unfortunately, Chrome OS hardware hasn’t historically been the best option for development… especially if you want to maintain the security offered by the powerwash technique that I mentioned.

    The desire to be able to travel anywhere, any time at a moments notice and feel confident that I can deal with anything that comes up while I’m gone using just my Chromebook ultimately drove me to experiment with setting up containerized development environments. I wanted something divorced from the hardware that I could easily get up and running and know that everything is setup the way I need it to be. This was great, but I still needed someplace where I could access these containers from anywhere. I eventually became more and more a fan of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  The container centric approach to everything and the fact that the price was right ultimately led me to migrate all of my cloud infrastructure to GCP. It wasn’t long before my containerized development environments followed… and then I discovered Google Cloud Shell.

    Using Google Cloud Shell as a Development Environment

    Google Cloud Shell takes this whole idea a step further. It gives me a 5GB persistent space accessible from any browser. I don’t even need the Chromebook any more. Everything that I store in my home directory stays there across sessions. Even better, it’s directly connected to all of my projects in GCP. I’ve been doing almost all of my recent development using Google Cloud Shell and the integrated Orion Editor exclusively… and I LOVE it! For web based development and microservices, it’s absolutely great. Especially if you’re ultimately deploying to GCP. The only time I’ve gone back to my ‘development’ laptop has been to do Android development as I haven’t really found a good solution for running things like Android Studio or emulators using this approach.

    But I want to develop for ‘free’

    Ok, I can hear a bunch of you thinking that you don’t want to be forced to develop on GCP (and potentially incur costs) before you’re ready to deploy to production. Guess what? ngrok works great in Google Cloud Shell… you can expose your local dev environment securely anywhere on the web without deploying your project to GCP. What about localhost? ngrok exposes debug information on 127.0.0.1, so there’s no way to access that from Google Cloud Shell, right? Wrong… with GCS, you can expose a ‘ ‘web preview’ from any port just by clicking on the icon within GCS, you can map this to expose ngrok’s debug interface.

    Onward to Production

    Google Cloud Shell obviously has all of the Google Cloud SDK integrated by default, so when you’re ready to go to production, it’s a piece of cake. GCS even knows which Cloud Project you’re working on (and reminds you of that fact in the terminal). Turn off ngrok, push to your cloud environment and update your systems to point to the production version!

    Google Cloud Shell Conclusion

    Is Google Cloud Shell the absolutely flawless solution to every development need that a digital nomad has? Definitely not, but it’s pretty damn good. I haven’t found a good way to do Android development this using it. It’s absolutely fantastic for doing Node development though…. especially if you’re deploying to GCP ultimately. Google Cloud Shell does have a usage limit of 60 hours per week.  If you’re burning the candle from both ends, you’ll want to remember to shut it down when you do take a break so that you don’t hit that limit. Give it a shot for yourself and let me know what you think.

  • Fermenting Solutions

    My email newsletter is entitled Fermenting Solutions. It started years ago as an effort to ‘dog food’ AWeber’s Curate mobile app. It’s a semi regular chronicle of a current project that I’m spending time on… the trials, tribulations and the interesting beverages I’ve had to drink while trying to work through them. You can read past issues here. If you’re interested in getting all new issues in your inbox, you can sign up using the form below.