Digital nomads… first world citizens?

For the latest years, I work as full-time Software Engineer in Luxembourg, France, and Ireland. Living abroad, far away from ones’ origin and country; is an unique experience, full of exciting emotional peeks and valleys.

Languages are therefore a big part of my life, both computer-related programming languages and human-related communication codes. I love learning, and concretely learning languages. In order of preference, I speak JavaScript, English, Ruby, Web (HTML5 & friends), French and Spanish.

Since I was a child, I strongly believe internet was the inevitable revolution that would change how people live in this society. My entire professional career turns around this idea (full stack web engineer).

However, there is something that I was expecting to happen and did not seem to have changed yet in Europe. People continue working on-site: in noisy open spaces, in cubicles, with long commutes… even though the internal communication actually happens by email, Jira, Slack, telephone, etc. The environment is most of the time too hostile to allow focusing on development and reaching your maximum efficiency, without getting disturbed every two minutes by some chitchat or someone touching your shoulder.

Some months ago, I read about an exciting way of living that would make compatible both of my passions: web development and traveling the world I am citizen of. I am talking about the lifestyle known by the buzz words digital nomad.

A digital nomad is a 21st century child, she is an ambitious and curious person who wants to learn and know. Digital nomads freelance and make a living online through platforms like Toptal. The philosophy is that a digital nomad does not build his life around his job, a digital nomad builds his job around his life. Being free(lancer) to live how and where you want brings you happiness, and therefore it boosts your performance.

Though I am not a digital nomad, I work as a freelance in my spare time. Programming brings me joy, and freelancing allows me to work with multiple codebases, and it helps me to keep the learning curve I like to have.

Every experience I have had as a freelance has been very rewarding. For this reason, I would love to take it to the next level, working within Toptal; and concretely being part of Toptal web freelancers group.

Toptal is a freelancing platform that has a strong technical screening process to filter freelancers. Only 3% of the total amount of applicants actually make it through. This process ensures that when a company looks for a freelancer, it will easily find a good match for its’ needs.