Where have I lived?

In the last three years, I’ve been living in the small town of Zwolle. My wife and I chose the city almost randomly. We just wanted to try and become homeowners, but we didn’t want to spend too much money on that experiment. That’s how, in 2023, we bought a house in a suburban area of Zwolle.

The Netherlands housing crisis is one of the biggest in Europe, but one hour from Amsterdam, you can still find cities where the price is relatively affordable. Together with the incredible conditions of the Dutch mortgage system, it adds up to a very good deal.

Life has been good. I cannot complain, and I don’t have to say anything bad about living in Zwolle. But maybe that was the issue. Life there was just nothing remarkable, nothing extraordinary, nothing bad, and nothing exciting.

We moved to the Netherlands after four years of travelling the world full-time. It was quite an exhausting lifestyle, especially when you were trying to build a career and a freelance business along the way. Needless to say, we were tired. So buying a house in a place without much going on had been exactly what we needed back then.

But after three years of living in Zwolle, both of us started hearing this little voice whispering “big city life, remember how awesome it was?”. Both of us grew up in large megacities, and of course, the buzz of the megapolis was part of our identities.

But what exactly are the upsides of the big city? To me personally, there were a few factors that I missed living in a small town:

Global/international mindset.

Zwolle is a very local city, and it can be amazing for some. You can easily find your community, help in the neighbourhood, and your children can easily find friends. I am through and through a global person. No matter which country I live in, I look for cosmopolitanism. I love having people from all over the world in my neighbourhood. Zwolle, on the other hand, mostly has Dutch people. I don’t have anything against Dutch people; they are great, actually. I just prefer a melting pot.

English.

Yeah, I know, I know. I am one of the annoying expats who still haven’t learned Dutch. I am learning, honestly, just extremely slowly. But it’s actually not the point. Even if I learn Dutch, I consider it a specialised language, same as my native language. I want to use it for special local cases or to talk with native speakers. But I do want to use English for my day-to-day life. I’ve been using English for the last seven years in almost every aspect of my existence, and I have no plans of stopping. So having English as at least one of the languages of the city would benefit me a lot. Which is absolutely not the case in Zwolle, as it’s one of the most Dutch cities in the country.

People.

Zwollenaars are great. They are relatively open-minded, considering that the city is so close to the Bible Belt of the Netherlands. They are friendly, nice, and all of that. But Zwolle has very few people in the tech/startup space. It’s just not the place where people go with such interests or careers. I am a very much tech-oriented person, and now I am building a tech startup as well. I wanted to find my crowd, because without like-minded people, it’s very hard to go by in life. I also enjoy meeting people who represent modernity: green initiatives, freedom, ambitions, building the future. I must admit I also like hipster places, whatever that means.

Never bored.

Depending on where you are in life, boredom can actually be good for you. But to me, a few years of it was enough. I miss going places. Zwolle has some things to offer, but it’s, of course, unable to compete with the amenities of a big city. Simply walking out of your house and exploring the city you live in, stumbling upon a new café, visiting a new cinema where you’ve never been before, exploring tens of different museums, going to meet-ups, events, and endless opportunities to do something energising. Zwolle, in my opinion, doesn’t have that. At least certainly not on an international scale. Local events, yes, plenty.

Testing the theory.

Those four factors were the main drivers of my thinking in the last year or so. But at the same time, in Zwolle, we had almost a perfect life on paper. We were afraid to give it up. We had a cheap mortgage, a calm, clean, and almost utopian city, and a big house. Who in their right mind would give it up?

So we decided to do a scientific approach and test the hypothesis of living in a big city. We’ve been considering various places around the country: Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Utrecht, but eventually decided to test the biggest of them all - Amsterdam. In the last few years, we visited Amsterdam quite often, and we’d grown to like being there.

In April 2026, we rented an apartment in Amsterdam for a month, and I was really curious what all the fuss and hate were about, because Amsterdam is a controversial place. If you listen long enough to the Dutch (outside of Amsterdam), you would think it’s the worst place on Earth. However, it’s not uncommon to hate capitals (Paris and Moscow have even more of that), so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Also, never listen to Rotterdammers’ opinion about the capital. They have their own thing going on there. At the same time, you can find many expats and tourists’ opinions that Amsterdam is the best place. The city is a part of the touristic/IG/TikTok bubble, so I wouldn’t trust this on 100% either.

Big city life.

So, we settled and started exploring the city, doing a lot of events, activities, and explorations to see how we fit into the Amsterdam lifestyle. After spending a month, my wife and I fell in love with the city. There are downsides to any big city, of course, but what matters the most is your inner feeling while being in that city. When you truly love being there, it becomes very easy to close your eyes on the downsides. The enjoyment overshadows it.

Also, it turned out, most of the negatives you hear about Amsterdam are not quite true.

Is it dirty and overwhelmed by tourists? It can be, but only if you spend your time in the middle of the Centrum. The first impression indeed can be quite terrible. If you walk out of the central train station and walk directly across the Damrak street towards the Dam Square, you might hate it. But it’s, in my opinion, the worst area of the city.

But if you start to explore wider and dig into more local areas, you find that the city is calm and beautiful. I actually really like how Amsterdam manages tourists. Despite having nearly 27 million day visits a year (a mind-blowing number), when you live here, you mostly don’t see them. Compared to Barcelona, for example, where tourists just overrun the city completely. Here, they mostly concentrate on a few central streets and canals.

All the four things I hoped to find in this city, I found here.

Amsterdam is an incredibly international city, with foreigners from all over the globe. There are thousands of people from tech, startup, and innovation ecosystems. Same with events, meetups, groups, and initiatives. At this point, the only limit to visiting them all is my time. Never the lack of spaces. Apart from the tech scene, there is always something to do, a venue to visit, a thing to try, an exhibition to enjoy, and a new café to try a coffee in. English, as I also discovered, is indeed de facto the language of the city. Most people use it for communication in day-to-day life. It doesn’t mean Dutch is absent; it is still very much the language of the Dutch people and government communication, and you still have to learn it to integrate properly. But English runs in the city culture very deeply.

Apart from all of those obvious benefits, I just like how I feel here. I genuinely feel happier and more content. Amsterdam is a very good fit for me, and I hope I’ll be a good fit for the city. I constantly catch myself just enjoying being here and smiling, no matter what I am doing.

They say you make three of the most important decisions that directly affect the quality of your life: what you work on, who you’re with, and where you live. I am quite settled on the first two questions, but where to live still wasn’t answered for me. I like the Netherlands, but I couldn’t find the right city. I honestly think Amsterdam might actually be the answer I was looking for.

In the end, it was an easy decision to give up all that “perfect” life in Zwolle when we felt how great of a fit Amsterdam was for us.

The cost.

Of course, with any change, there are costs. In Amsterdam, the literal cost of living is a huge downside, as it’s one of the most expensive cities in Europe, especially with the chaos on the rental market.

But there are other costs as well. A big city means more noise, more pollution, more chaos and busyness. My opinion might change, but so far I feel like Amsterdam still hits a very good spot of being a huge cosmopolitan international hub, without being overwhelming. Somehow they managed to separate very busy tourist and business centres from the rest of the residential parts where your life actually happens. But of course, there might be more downsides to surface as I stay here for longer. Especially knowing myself, I tend to idolise places at first, so I wonder if my opinion will change in a year or two.

I’ll keep you posted about my life in Amsterdam here. Stay tuned!

For a long time, I wanted to do something related to the platform, and it took me a lot of brainstorming, a few failed attempts, and a bit of luck stumbling upon an old friend turned co-founder to finally start something in the space.

Let me introduce you to Influesque, the YouTube marketing platform. We aim to build the best tool for businesses that want to explore creators as part of their marketing strategy. Right now, our database of creators is already very comprehensive (though it's almost exclusively English-speaking), and we use some magic to deliver a lot of metrics that help you find a perfect fit.

There are many metrics already live: historical creator performance, calculated metrics like engagement rate and average views, insights into creators' audiences, details about their niches and topics, and much more. But what we're most proud of is our sponsorship detection mechanism. We've already analysed more than 20 million videos and collected a huge database of companies that partner with creators. This way, companies can find their competitors and tap into this amazing market.

We also have a fancy-smart search that lets people use plain language to describe their queries instead of clicking around filters. But of course, clicking around is also allowed.

There are many more features on our roadmap as we explore the specific types of problems we can solve for this market. We've started adding simple Trello-style campaign management, creator management with shortlists, and things like that, but more to come!

I'll be honest. My true mission for this product is to help more YouTube creators build a sustainable income doing what they love. But to do that, we need more brands willing to work not only with huge names but with mid-size and small creators as well. That's why we started by building it specifically for brands. There are definitely a lot of exciting ideas for expanding the product for creators too. Stay tuned!

If you've read something here that could be interesting to you, your company, or someone you know, just drop me an email and we can take it from there. We have a free trial as well, so you can simply sign up and try the product yourself. I'd really appreciate any feedback, as it's the most important driving force for us right now.

The best way to follow the product is by signing up (we send not-annoying monthly updates) or following us on LinkedIn (either me, my co-founder, or the product page itself).

In other news, I'm slowly crawling back onto YouTube with new videos, and there are a lot of personal updates (I moved to Amsterdam!) coming there too.

Cheers, and have a fantastic weekend!

Reading only gets you so far, and it won’t help much when you actually need to apply that knowledge.

If you want to learn the language, you need to stop obsessing over grammar and structure. Go and actually consume and use that language.

If you want to learn a musical instrument, it won’t get you far if you study notes and music theory. Just go and play the instrument.

Theory remains theoretical. It doesn’t create anything.

Humans are practical creatures, but we like patterns a bit too much. That’s why we try to create the perfect structures for knowledge and come up with words to describe them. It comes in handy for passing knowledge down through generations. That’s helped with our progress as each generation didn’t have to start over.

But even in the age when we have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we haven’t become the most skilled humans ever. We still need to practice whatever we set out to do to achieve mastery.

I’d even argue that practice is life.

ChatGPT launched three years ago. Big tech made countless promises that it would change our lives in dramatic ways. But did it really?

I was initially extremely excited about ChatGPT and other chatbots. For the first time, it seemed that we were truly moving forward with something completely new, and it’s always exciting. Especially because for years before that, most of the tech releases were VC and social media bubbles like NFTs. It felt like we were moving in circles without anything innovative going on.

ChatGPT quickly became a big part of my life. But after the initial wow effect and excitement, I started noticing its limitations. With each new version, OpenAI promised breakthroughs, but the actual changes were smaller and smaller. Even after other giants like Google joined the gold rush of AI, I didn’t see any actual problems being solved by AI. 

I am not denying that AI tech is now part of everyday life for most people. But I’d argue it improved it in just two (though huge) ways. The improvement of search (the “what”) and communication to the internet (the “how”).

What we got in the end is basically a much better version of Google (and other search engines). It is also better suited for humans than what we had before, as you can communicate with it in natural language. Less tech, more humane. It’s a great improvement, sure. But it’s not as revolutionary as traditional and social media often claim it to be.

To me, one of the biggest shifts was how I do my job: software engineering. I definitely have a different routine now. I rely more on AI to search for solutions and automatically apply them in my code editor. It’s incredibly fast, but it’s still the same programming I did before. Instead of Googling and learning about various solutions, I just use AI to find them for me, and review them after. Amazing improvement, not the revolution.

Of course, I also use ChatGPT instead of Google most of the time. Yes, I can ask it to reformat or analyse the information it found in all the ways that are convenient for me. But it is still the same search engine with a better communication interface.

Most of the other use cases I see promoted on social media and half-baked “announcements” from Silicon Valley either never see the light of day or just work worse than the solutions we had before.

There are also creativity applications. But who actually asked for them? For some reason, AI companies decided that humans have issues with creativity. So they gathered all their money and computational power to generate writing, images, videos, music, and other products of creativity for us. But why?

What artist ever asked for that? What musician ever said “I wish my music had been writing itself, and I was just typing to the chatbot instead”?

Humans ended up with creativity as form of self-expression and self-understanding. There was never a problem to solve there. The creativity and the strive for mastery is the sole goal, not the product.

My personal hope for AI is that it’ll change the course of its development and start solving real problems we have. Annoying tasks that we never want to do, like dealing with bureaucracy. Or maybe they’ll start making life better for people who struggle with daily tasks, that would be a noble goal.

But I guess it’s just easier to raise another round or make a splash on X with “AI photo generator” instead of “AI that files quarterly VAT taxes for you so you can focus on business” or “AI that can adjust a school curriculum depending on a child’s development stage”.

I really hope all that money poured in will go toward making life better for people instead of generating endless slop filling the internet that nobody, except other AI bots, wants to see.

--

Written in my temporary home office in Barcelona.

The huge problem with that is our mind doesn’t see a difference between doing a thing and thinking about doing it. If I spend the whole day planning and thinking about how my next project will be a huge success, I get tired the same way as I would be actually making this project a reality.

The same goes for learning or practising. Sometimes, I spend many hours preparing a learning plan. Then I notice how motivation for it starts to fade. Then, even when I start learning the skill, I focus on the goal, I focus on the future gratification when I will finally be able to do what I am learning. In that moment the motivation is completely gone, and all I can think of is how I failed to learn another skill.

The reality, however, is that the most important process is happening right now. If I focus on the actual process of the present, on the actual action I am doing right now, everything else doesn’t matter. Everything else will become the product of the focus.

The project you are working on will become the result of the action you’re doing right in this moment. The new skill will become the result of the process of practising this craft.

There are no shortcuts in life, and everything that’s worth pursuing requires patience, time, and practice. But the reality is that life itself is the practice of the present moment too. The future and past don’t exist. The only moment you have is now.

As soon as this understanding truly settles in, life becomes much more enjoyable and pleasant. You don’t need to focus on gratifications, purchases, goals, and achievements. The only thing that’s important is to focus on whatever it is you’re doing and actually doing it. That’s it.

The phrase from the fantasy series “The Stormlight Archive” by Brandon Sanderson “journey before destination” is actually more than just another cliché quote to post on your Facebook page.

I’d argue it’s life itself, and it’s the only way to achieve everything you want and enjoy the process. Because the process is everything.

I started feeling my despair toward them a few years ago, starting with Instagram. I always loved the idea of a place where everyone shared personalized content on their feed. It was supposed to be a photo journal of your life. You could keep up with what friends were doing and follow some photographers and filmmakers.

It kind of worked for a while. Until Meta (owner of Instagram) decided to pick another strategy of squeezing every last bit of your attention toward their app. They started doing everything in their power to hook you as fast as possible and then keep you glued to the screen as long as possible.

The Stories feature was the first step in that direction. It was intentionally developed so you MUST look at whatever everyone else was doing. Otherwise, it disappeared. Then it was reinforced by TikTok‑inspired Reels. The Reels tab was designed to quickly feed you one quick sensational video after another. The sole purpose of that was to glue your eyeballs to the screen.

Instagram doesn’t care about creativity or self‑expression. Creators are not their customers. Businesses are. And businesses want that sweet attention for ads.

I was on and off IG for a few years until I finally stopped using it last year for good.

I was never (thankfully) seriously using TikTok, so I avoided this plague. But as with IG Reels, I went through a difficult journey with YouTube Shorts. I can’t say I watched them a lot, but they were always in my life because I watch YouTube a lot, and I create videos for this platform myself. As a creator, it was immediately clear that this is a huge focus for YouTube. Which is nothing but sad to me, as I genuinely love this platform and the creativity it always promoted. But yet again, another platform was falling into the same pitfall.

After some thinking, however, I realized that it shouldn’t be this way. If my goal is creativity and providing value for people, I shouldn’t force myself to be a slave to the algorithms and big corporations. I settled on the idea to continue creating long‑form content no matter what, and kept distancing myself from YT Shorts.

The only exception I’ve made is for the series I call "Monday coffee." I am making them specifically to slow down people’s Shorts feeds, take a breather, and discuss one thing I’m presenting in each week’s episode. This is my answer to short‑form content. I turned it into anti‑algorithm short video podcasts. And I’ve been enjoying making those shorts, too, as they keep me grounded and disciplined.

Lastly, there was text‑based social media, where I’d stayed the longest: Twitter (or how it now stupidly calls itself "X"). I had always had a special connection to this place. It’s where I learned a lot about the lifestyle I want to live. It’s where I met developers, digital nomads, and indie hackers. It’s where I met an amazing community, even meeting some people offline.

Unfortunately, after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk (although it started even before that), this place became absolutely insufferable. I thought TikTok was the king of promoting the most ridiculous and controversial type of content just to keep you watching, but X seems to have mastered it on a new level.

In the last few years, the platform turned great communities into a pit with the most controversial, polarizing, rage‑baiting type of content you can imagine. And even people I liked and respected before started either following these rules and posting only "hot takes". Or they just became the recycling machines reposting the same thoughts and ideas lacking originality, just because it brought the most views.

It became even worse after AI gained its popularity, and more and more tools started promoting writing AI content. To me, the last nail in the coffin was Typefully releasing a feature that will imitate your persona and generate AI tweets for you. All of that completely killed the individuality and community parts I loved so much about Twitter.

So as the last social media in my life, I am done with X too. Now, I am completely off the hook ;)

After some time enjoying my freedom, I started thinking about how to make the Internet feel good again. I definitely recommend watching an incredible video by the CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte, who is asking the same question.

I definitely don’t have all the answers yet, but I started by both creating and consuming content more intentionally.

Here are two rules I set for myself:

• Always make content that is fueled by my personal beliefs, creative passion, and value you can provide to real humans. Do not focus on algorithms, hooks, funnels, and other business metrics.
• Consume content intentionally by the creators you discover and feel connected with, instead of allowing algorithms to dictate and "tailor" your taste.

It already led to curating how I consume YouTube videos. And since I no longer get my content from social media, I started creating my RSS and newsletters feed again. Honestly, it feels liberating and enjoyable. I feel much more connected to creators, compared to the superficial feed consumption.

With this first post, I am also intending to return to writing myself. I am a type of person who likes to share, but I want to do it on my own terms, at my own pace and place, and it should look and feel like me. So I am starting by bringing this blog to life.

As my main distribution system, I picked Substack. All the posts from this blog will be reposted and distributed there in the form of a newsletter. I am also planning to occasionally do photo dumps, making my own photo feed, since IG failed to do so.

If you’re tired of social media and big corporations turning creativity into junk fast food, join the journey. I will be talking about this topic a lot as it deeply concerns me. I also love to make content about a better and free life, money, travel, and life abroad.

The two places where you can (intentionally) find my content:

1. Videos on my YouTube channel (only long‑form content + Monday coffee series)
2. My writing at this blog. You can follow it via Substack newsletter, or directly via RSS (e.g. on Feedly).

See you soon.

--

Written on a couch in my living room in Zwolle.

Presenting to you Search to Play - a social platform for gamers.

I am a huge fan of tracking my media. I am a long-time Goodreads reader and I've been tracking my movies since 2008 - first on the service of my native country, then on IMDb and finally moving to an amazing Letterboxd from which I take a lot of inspiration for this project.

But more than any other media, I love video games. I've been playing them since I was a little kid, and I still play them. I also follow the industry/news a lot.

To give you a perspective, I was a magazine subscriber (when subscriptions meant something different) of the very first Russian magazine about video games. I was also a witness to an era when video game journalism was born in Russia too, watching very first reports from E3 game convention and dreaming to be a part of all of that. I’ve never become a journalist or even a game developer, but I wanted to still be part of the industry. So this project was born from my passion.

After a research on the landscape of gaming discovery and tracking, I concluded that there are no clear leaders in this area. Some projects exist, but they either treated as side projects or they’re not filling the gap I wanted to close. So I’ve decided to build my own, treat it like a business, and try my hardest to make it work.

After about a month of active building, I’ve managed to put together an MVP version that’s lacking a lot, but still has many basic features I personally want to use, and most importantly, have all the video games (that was quite an import).

Currently, the project is in the stage of searching for early adopters and gathering valuable feedback. Simultaneously, I am experimenting with the marketing channels I will be able to pursue for long-term growth. Such a project will be quite hard to properly monetise (since a big chunk of it has to stay free), and it requires a large number of users, so I have to think about a long-term strategy. There are also some potential challenges with user-generated content. But nothing that’s never been solved before, so I feel confident.

I am super excited to be taking on this journey and I love both working on and already using the project too (it's pretty awesome to have a profile on my own social platform), so I hope people will feel the same way.

If you’re reading this and want to give it a try (or share it with gamer friends), feel free to send any feedback or opinion you have my way or post on my feature request board.

One day won’t change anything, but it might be the sign your body is telling you to take a break. Try to forget about anything and focus on yourself. What exactly do you need right now?

Maybe you just need to sleep it out, so go to sleep for 30 minutes or go to sleep early today. Maybe you just need to get some comfort. Take a "me" day and do something simple: walk outside, drink a warm tea, or sit without any stimulations or distractions. Don’t force yourself to do or think anything. Just let it be.

If you feel like it, try to make some small activities, very simple, or maybe something enjoyable. Maybe writing, drawing, or cleaning. If you find yourself like you’re not feeling or enjoying it, that’s okay too. Just rest.

It’s part of being human, and all of us feel this way from time to time. The most important thing is to acknowledge your feelings and give yourself a break from the world. Take care of yourself.

It got me thinking: how much time should we spend on things and activities we truly enjoy? Then I remembered the Pareto principle, which states that 20% of effort brings 80% of results.

What if we apply it to happiness and spend 20% of our time doing things we "have-to-do" in our adult lives: obligations, paperwork, chores, bureaucracy, talking to technical support, small talks, annoying parenting activities like school meetings, staying in lines, and many more; you probably know yours.

If we sleep 8 hours and have 16 hours of active hours in a day, we should dedicate approximately 3-4 hours per day to obligatory activities, leaving 12-13 hours for things we enjoy. In that case, you get the best results from mandatory commitments and enjoy the biggest part of your life.

But how to build a life where you enjoy 80% of your day?

By looking into activities you enjoy the least, but they drain the most of your day. For many people, it might be work. If you enjoy 100% of your job, you are already ahead of many people.

Despite people complaining about their jobs all the time, the satisfaction rate is rarely in absolutes. Most people enjoy some parts of their work and don’t enjoy the others. Find the way to do more things you like and optimize or eliminate the rest.

If you don’t enjoy most of your work hours, maybe it’s time to look at the bigger picture: maybe this career is not for you? Maybe this particular job isn’t a good fit? Maybe it’s time to make some drastic changes? I can tell you from experience that changing careers is hard but well worth it in the end.

Same goes for any other activities. Hate going to the gym? Find sport activities you love. Spending too much time on paperwork or chores? Think about how to optimize and automate them. I also recommend taking a serious look at time spent on social media and other mindless digital activities. As I recently learned, this doesn’t bring joy for most people.

If you don’t know what you like, spending time discovering your passions is also worth it. Once activities are discovered, they bring you a lot of happiness.

I should mention that I see this not as a strict rule but rather as a path. Many people might never find a way to build a life where 3-4 hours is enough for mandatory things. But by striving towards it, you find yourself on a very pleasing journey.

Step-by-step, replace your biggest time-sinkers with meaningful activities, and one day, you’ll find yourself happy, without thinking about the principals applied.

hey everyone!

I’m back with a new update about my recent adventures.

First, some exciting news that I haven’t mentioned in this newsletter: my wife and I bought a car! I’ve already talked about it on my YouTube channel and explained why we made this decision. My latest newsletter issue played a part in the whole process.

If you’re curious about the details of buying a car, here’s a video link:

This weekend, I went on my first multi-day road trip from the Netherlands to Copenhagen, Denmark.

We considered staying at a hotel overnight, but we had a great experience camping in our Tesla. Recently, I bought a new and even better mattress made specifically for the Tesla Model Y, so it was a perfect chance to test it out. The mattress is called the “Exped Megamat Auto”, in case anyone’s curious.

Since Copenhagen is known as one of the most bike‑friendly cities, we also brought along our bikes. We recently purchased a tow hitch for the Tesla and a bike rack, so this trip with bikes behind was another experiment for us.

The bike rack was generally easy to install and use, but one unexpected thing happened: we couldn’t use one of Tesla’s basic Autopilot features—Autosteer. You can still use Traffic‑Aware Cruise Control, which maintains speed and distance from other cars, but you have to steer manually.

It was a bit disappointing because Autosteer is a fantastic feature for road trips and really helps on long distances. I assume it needs the back cameras, which are probably blocked by the bike rack.

After driving about 150 km through the Netherlands, we reached the German border, but then I realised I had forgotten all my documents, including my driver’s license. That was a real low point of the trip.

In Europe, you can easily get relaxed about carrying IDs because nobody ever asks for them. However, it felt too risky to continue driving through multiple countries without any identification, so I decided to turn back.

On the first day, I ended up driving an extra 350 kilometers (back home and then back to the German border again). I almost reached our planned overnight stop, it required several hours of driving in the dark, which I don’t particularly enjoy.

Eventually, we found a parking spot north of Hamburg around 1 a.m. and had a sleepover there. I discovered a great app called park4night, which is mostly used by campervan owners to find places to sleep anywhere in the world.

Surprisingly, we had an amazing sleepover. It was in a large shopping mall’s parking lot, and we even had a nice breakfast and coffee nearby the next morning.

The sleeping mat turned out to be extremely comfortable, almost as good as sleeping at home. This mat has a foam layer on top of an air mattress, so it feels like a real foam mattress you have on your bed. You can also adjust the firmness by letting in or releasing air. We brought our pillows from home, so that added to the comfort.

I do like staying in hotels, but there’s something special about road‑tripping, sleeping in a car, waking up close to nature while still feeling protected and comfortable, and hitting the road right away.

The second day, I drove the rest of the trip, making it in total 1300+ km driving. First impressions of Danish roads were very positive: the infrastructure and roads are as good as in The Netherlands and people have a very nice driving culture. Of course, the electric cars and charging stations here are everywhere. It’s probably the most number of Teslas I have seen on the streets (but I still haven’t been to Norway), more than I noticed in Sweden and back home.

I’ll be staying in Copenhagen for the next seven days, and I’m really looking forward to exploring the city. There will be a full video about this city, so make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

see you soon!

written in Copenhagen’s library 🇩🇰

Hey there,

It’s classic of me to say that I’m returning to the newsletter and disappearing for another month. Sorry about that! I will try to be better. But I am gladly reporting that I still don’t use social media!

Today, I wanted to share a little story on how we traveled by land from Zwolle, the Netherlands, to Cluj, Romania, in June.

We had a great time in Romania, and I shared the information about the city in my latest video. Check it out if you haven’t already. But the road there wasn’t as great.

Our trip

We wanted to make an experiment and travel more sustainably through Europe without using planes. I hope this post won’t be seen as a rant but rather a current land‑travel state report.

Here is an overview of the path we took:

• 🇳🇱 Day 1: Regular local train from Zwolle to Utrecht
• 🇦🇹 Day 1: Utrecht to Vienna night NightJet train
• 🇦🇹 Day 2: Spend the whole day walking around Vienna from 9 am to 8 pm
• 🇷🇸 Day 2: Took a night Flixbus from Vienna to Belgrade
• 🇷🇸 Day 3–4: Spent a few nights in Belgrade
• 🇭🇺 Day 5: Took a morning Flixbus from Belgrade to Budapest
• 🇭🇺 Day 5: Walked around Budapest until 11 pm
• 🇷🇴 Day 5: Took a night bus from Budapest to Cluj‑Napoca
• 🇷🇴 Day 6: Arrived in Romania

I cannot say I enjoyed Nightjet trains much, but I immediately forgot about their quality once we traveled by bus.

I hadn’t traveled by bus for some time and immediately remembered how uncomfortable it could be. You cannot sleep on the bus—only snooze occasionally. I wish there were a train connection, but unfortunately, this part of Europe still doesn’t have reasonable train solutions, including a connection to Romania.

The Serbian‑Hungarian border was probably the most exhausting part. We spent around 6–8 hours crossing it, which was especially hard during the night trip. We should have arrived at 5 a.m. but came to Belgrade around noon, completely drained.

It took the same 6–8 hours on the border to leave Serbia, but it was a little bit easier since it was daytime.

I don’t know what’s happening at this border, but I do not recommend crossing it by land. Some people on the bus said it’s been like this for at least a year already.

The land‑crossing border to Romania was quick and easy, however. Despite entering the Schengen zone, Romania still has border controls on land, but I think they will eventually abolish it. It took us, at most, 20–25 minutes to cross it.

The funny thing is that the only people who were even asked anything at the border were us (Russian citizenship) and another guy from Oman. I guess everyone else had EU or at least non‑suspicious passports 😂

We took the same trip but skipped Serbia on the way back to the Netherlands, so it was a bit smoother without terrible borders. However, it still took us two nights to get home, and the sleep schedule was ruined.

Conclusion

Eventually, I conclude that traveling by land must improve significantly before it can be as comfortable as using planes and cars—especially in Eastern Europe. The EU must launch more trains and faster rail connections across the continent.

The current price/comfort ratio could be way better. Many train startups are entering the market (like Dutch GoVolta, Spanish Avlo, and Dutch/Belgian European Sleeper), so hopefully, they will manage to dominate the low‑cost train market, and we’ll see the prices around the plane level.

Right now, with NightJet, for example, for around €150–200, you get an average‑quality couchette (especially compared to regular seating fast‑trains in the Netherlands, Germany, or Spain) with 6 people inside the compartment. I think the price should be at least three times lower.

For ourselves, we concluded that travel by night train is fine as long as you don’t have connections the next day. As for buses—it was probably the last time we traveled this way. I think it’s the worst way to travel, and you need a lot of time to recover afterward. The cheap cost is not worth it.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with more exciting news and updates!

Introduction

The Dutch housing market has been a topic of considerable interest and activity over the past few decades. Known for its dynamic and resilient nature, the market has seen significant growth, particularly in the 2010s, driven by various economic and policy factors. Whether you're an expat settling in a beautiful Dutch city or a local making a long-term investment, understanding current market trends and influencing factors is crucial. Staying informed about the housing market can help you make better decisions and anticipate future trends.

This article will explore the critical aspects of the Dutch housing market in 2024. We’ll start with an overview of the historical trends and growth, then dive into the factors that have shaped the market, including government policies, economic conditions, and demographic changes. We’ll also examine the current trends and statistics, highlighting regional variations and price differences across major cities and smaller towns. Additionally, we’ll discuss the different housing types available in the Netherlands, each offering unique benefits and challenges.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the Dutch housing market, equipping you with the knowledge needed to navigate this competitive landscape.

Overview of the Dutch Real Estate Market

The Dutch real estate market has grown significantly over the past few decades, with a notable increase in the 2010s. This growth has been driven by several factors, including the government’s decision to set very low mortgage interest rates following the 2008 economic crisis. At times, these rates were close to 0%, making homeownership more accessible by allowing buyers to finance 100% of the house price with a mortgage. This financial strategy spurred home purchases and stimulated the broader economy by encouraging consumer spending and investment in housing development.

Immigration trends have also played a crucial role in this growth. The Netherlands has become a popular destination for expats, drawn by its high quality of life, robust job market, and vibrant cultural scene. This influx has increased demand for housing, particularly in major cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, where job opportunities and amenities are abundant. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the housing shortage, further straining the market as lockdowns and remote work increased the desire for larger living spaces.

This graph shows the trends since 1995. You might notice that housing prices have doubled twice in the last two decades:

Source: cbs.nl

Despite concerns about market instability, the Netherlands remains one of the best countries in Europe in terms of Mortgage or House Price to Income ratio. This, combined with relatively simple mortgage practices and a transparent real estate system, creates an attractive environment for homeowners. As a result, both local and international buyers continue to view the Dutch property market as a stable and lucrative investment.

Factors Influencing the Dutch Housing Market

Several factors contribute to the dynamics of the Dutch housing market, including interest rates, economic conditions, and government policies. Understanding these can help you make informed decisions and anticipate future trends, such as shifts in housing demand, price fluctuations, and the emergence of new residential hotspots.

Government Policies

The Dutch government has played a significant role in shaping the housing market. After the 2008 economic crisis, the government introduced a series of proactive policies to stimulate the housing market’s recovery.

One of the most impactful measures was the reduction of mortgage interest rates to historically low levels, at times nearing 0%. This unprecedented move made homeownership more accessible and affordable, encouraging more people to buy homes and stimulating market activity.

On this graph, you can see that interest rates dropped significantly starting in 2008. Rates continued to decline over the years, reaching near-zero all-time low levels by the end of 2021, partly due to efforts to stimulate the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: tradingeconomics.com

Additionally, the government allows buyers to finance 100% of the house price with a mortgage, effectively reducing the barrier of a large down payment. This policy has been particularly beneficial for first-time buyers and expats who may not have substantial savings.

Moreover, these measures have helped stabilise the housing market, fostering a more resilient economy and promoting long-term financial security for homeowners. The combination of low mortgage rates and full financing options has created a more inclusive and dynamic housing market in the Netherlands.

Economic Conditions

The overall economic health of the Netherlands significantly impacts the housing market. The country has a robust and stable economy with impressively low unemployment rates, which in turn boosts consumer confidence and purchasing power. High-income levels coupled with favorable employment conditions make it easier for individuals to qualify for mortgages and sustain homeownership.

Additionally, the Netherlands’ strategic location within Europe and its strong international trade connections further enhance economic stability. This, in turn, is reflected in the housing market, where demand often outpaces supply, leading to a dynamic and competitive real estate environment.

Immigration and Population Growth

The Netherlands is an attractive destination for expats due to its high quality of life, excellent infrastructure, and robust economy. Known for its picturesque canals, vibrant cultural scene, and progressive policies, the country offers a welcoming environment for international professionals.

This influx of expats has increased the demand for housing, particularly in major cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. These urban centers, renowned for their historical charm and modern amenities, have become hotspots for foreign talent.

However, the housing shortage has been exacerbated by the growing population, which has outpaced the supply of new housing units. The challenge is further intensified by the limited availability of land and stringent building regulations, complicating efforts to expand housing stock. Consequently, rental prices have surged, making it increasingly competitive and costly to secure accommodation. Despite these challenges, the Netherlands continues to be a sought-after destination for those seeking a blend of professional opportunities and a high standard of living.

COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the housing market. Initially, the pandemic caused uncertainty and slowed down market activity, as lockdowns and health concerns kept buyers and sellers at bay. However, it soon led to a surge in demand as people sought more spacious homes due to increased time spent at home, remote work, and the need for home offices. The shift to remote work allowed many to relocate from urban centers to suburban or rural areas, further intensifying demand.

The pandemic also disrupted supply chains and construction projects, contributing to the housing shortage. Labor shortages, delays in obtaining materials, and increased costs for lumber and other building supplies exacerbated the situation. This confluence of factors led to skyrocketing home prices and fierce competition among buyers, reshaping the housing market in ways that continue to reverberate.

Housing Shortages

The Netherlands has been grappling with a housing shortage for several years. The demand for housing far exceeds the supply, particularly in urban areas where the population continues to grow rapidly. This shortage has driven up prices and made the market highly competitive, forcing many to reconsider their living arrangements. Prospective buyers often face intense bidding wars and need to act quickly to secure properties, sometimes even within hours of a listing going live.

Additionally, the shortage has led to increased rental prices, making it difficult for students, young professionals, and low-income families to find affordable accommodation. The government and developers are under pressure to implement innovative solutions to address this crisis and provide sustainable, long-term housing options.

Interest Rates and Financing

Interest rates play a crucial role in the housing market. Low interest rates reduce the cost of borrowing, making mortgages more affordable for a broader range of prospective buyers. This, in turn, can drive up demand and, consequently, home prices. However, interest rates are subject to change based on economic conditions, inflation, and central bank policies aimed at maintaining economic stability.

In 2023, mortgage interest rates were raised to nearly 4%, causing a temporary cooling of the market as potential buyers grappled with higher monthly payments. This increase was a response to inflationary pressures and was intended to curb excessive borrowing and spending. As rates stabilized and the economy adjusted, the market began to heat up again in 2024, with more buyers returning to the market and sellers adjusting their expectations.

The dynamic interplay between interest rates and market activity underscores the importance of understanding broader economic trends when making housing decisions. For both buyers and investors, staying informed about these trends is essential for navigating the ever-changing landscape of the housing market.

Trends and Statistics in 2024

After a cooling period in 2023 due to increased mortgage interest rates, the Dutch housing market began to heat up again in 2024. The average house price surged by 6-7% in the first half of the year, driven by ongoing demand and limited supply, and this upward trend shows no signs of slowing down. Housing shortages remain significant, particularly in high-demand urban areas, where competition for properties is fierce.

The Randstad area continues to be the most expensive region, with Amsterdam leading the pack in both desirability and cost. Other costly cities include Amstelveen, Haarlem, and Utrecht, each known for their vibrant cultural scenes and excellent amenities.

For a better perspective, here are the average house prices and price per square meter for the 20 most populated municipalities based on 2024 Q2 statistics, highlighting the stark differences in affordability across the country and underscoring the challenges faced by prospective homeowners:

1. Amsterdam: €603,173, price per m²: €7,639
2. Haarlem: €523,504, price per m²: €5,249
3. Haarlemmermeer (mainly Hoofddorp): €517,500, price per m²: €4,353
4. Amersfoort: €469,364, price per m²: €4,307
5. Utrecht: €468,629, price per m²: €5,272
6. Eindhoven: €441,113, price per m²: €3,973
7. The Hague: €438,677, price per m²: €4,067
8. ’s-Hertogenbosch: €437,420, price per m²: €4,070
9. Almere: €433,807, price per m²: €3,877
10. Breda: €424,718, price per m²: €3,881
11. Zwolle: €411,144, price per m²: €3,677
12. Zaanstad (mainly Zaandam): €409,203, price per m²: €3,945
13. Nijmegen: €405,301, price per m²: €3,984
14. Apeldoorn: €391,798, price per m²: €3,412
15. Rotterdam: €391,061, price per m²: €4,057
16. Arnhem: €387,258, price per m²: €3,405
17. Tilburg: €362,354, price per m²: €3,297
18. Enschede: €325,461, price per m²: €2,829
19. Groningen: €323,901, price per m²: €3,404
20. Leeuwarden: €283,902, price per m²: €2,586

Regional Variations in the Dutch Housing Market

The Dutch housing market is not uniform; there are significant regional variations in house prices and demand. Understanding these regional differences is essential for prospective buyers.

Randstad Area

The Randstad is the most densely populated and economically significant area in the Netherlands, encompassing cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. This region has the highest house prices due to its economic opportunities, cultural attractions, and excellent infrastructure.

• Amsterdam: As the capital city and a major global hub, Amsterdam has the highest house prices in the country. The city’s vibrant culture, numerous job opportunities, and high quality of life attract both locals and expats. The average house price in Amsterdam is €603,173, with a price per square meter of €7,639.
• Utrecht: Known for its historical charm and central location, Utrecht is another highly sought-after city. The average house price in Utrecht is €468,629, with a price per square meter of €5,272.

Other Major Cities

Outside the Randstad, several other cities also have high demand and relatively high house prices.

• Eindhoven: Known as the technology and innovation hub of the Netherlands, Eindhoven attracts many professionals and expats. The average house price in Eindhoven is €441,113, with a price per square meter of €3,973.
• The Hague: As the seat of the Dutch government and home to numerous international organizations, The Hague has a significant expat population. The average house price in The Hague is €438,677, with a price per square meter of €4,067.

Smaller Cities and Towns

House prices tend to be lower in smaller cities and towns, but these areas can offer excellent quality of life and good value for money.

• Zwolle: A charming city with a rich history, Zwolle offers more affordable housing compared to the Randstad. The average house price in Zwolle is €411,144, with a price per square meter of €3,677.
• Leeuwarden: As the capital of the Friesland province, Leeuwarden is known for its cultural heritage and lower cost of living. The average house price in Leeuwarden is €283,902, with a price per square meter of €2,586.

Types of Housing in the Netherlands

There are various types of houses, but generally, each property can be categorized into one of these types:

• Apartments or Flats (Appartement): Regular apartments, sometimes with an outside area, are predominantly found in bustling urban areas, especially in cities like Rotterdam. These compact living spaces are ideal for singles, young professionals, and small families, offering convenience and proximity to amenities. Apartments are among the most affordable types of housing in the Netherlands, making them a popular choice for first-time homebuyers and renters.
• Terraced House or Row House (Tussenwoning): The quintessential Dutch dwelling, terraced houses are the backbone of residential neighborhoods. These homes share walls with neighbors on both sides, fostering a sense of community. A typical terraced house often features a cozy garden and occasionally a front yard, perfect for families seeking a balance of affordability and outdoor space.
• Corner House or End-of-Terrace (Hoekwoning or Eindwoning): Similar to a row house but situated at the end of a row, corner houses offer more privacy by sharing only one wall with neighbors. They often come with larger gardens and additional windows, providing more natural light. These homes strike a balance between the communal feel of terraced houses and the privacy of detached homes.
• Detached House (Vrijstaande woning): These stand-alone houses offer the ultimate in privacy and space, with no shared walls. Often equipped with a garden, parking garage, or driveway, detached homes are ideal for families seeking spacious living environments. However, this luxury comes at a price, as detached houses are among the most expensive in the country.
• Semi-Detached House or Double House (2-onder-1-kapwoning or Halfvrijstaande woning): These homes feature two families sharing a single wall. While more affordable than detached houses, semi-detached homes still offer considerable space and privacy. They are a popular choice for those looking to upgrade from a terraced house without the full expense of a detached home.
• Houseboat (Woonboot): A unique and charming option in the Netherlands, houseboats offer a lifestyle close to nature, floating on the canals and rivers. While fascinating to explore, houseboats present unique challenges in terms of mortgages and buying conditions, which are more complex than conventional houses.

Conclusion

The Dutch housing market offers a variety of options for potential homeowners, whether you are looking for a budget-friendly apartment or a spacious detached house. Understanding the market trends and different types of housing can help you make an informed decision.

The Dutch housing market in 2024 presents a unique landscape of opportunities and challenges. From government policies to economic conditions, several factors influence the market dynamics. Understanding these trends and regional variations is crucial for anyone looking to enter the housing market. The high demand and limited supply mean that prospective buyers need to be well-prepared and informed about current conditions.

What’s happening?

For the last 6 months, or maybe even more, I’ve grown increasingly disappointed in the social media distorted reality many of us live in today, myself included. We all have different excuses: Some connect with friends, some try to elevate their branding or business presence, and some just do it out of habit.

I give social media the most precious thing I have—my time, so I started asking myself, what am I actually getting in return? After thinking a lot about this, I couldn’t find an answer. It seems I pay with my time for…nothing?

In addition to my personal disappointment, social media is literally running our society slowly but very successfully. All the information is becoming fast food and insanely polarized. I see it in politics, religions, and other opinions. Everything is black and white because that’s the only color we have time to squeeze into decreasing media formats in stories, tweets, and short videos. But the world is much more complex and exciting than we see on our screens.

To put the money where my mouth is, I’m conducting an experiment. For the next three months, I’m entirely stopping using all social media except YouTube. I don’t count it as social media per se; despite some classic social media features, YouTube can be consumed consciously and algorithm-free (except for YouTube Shorts). Of course, I won’t be posting there either since it would be hypocritical. Hopefully, after 3 months, I will never come back.

I aim to produce “calm” and sustainable content that I am genuinely excited about instead of constantly chasing new social media trends and serving algorithms.

If you’re curious about learning more about the “calm” approach, here is a great YouTube video (about an artistic calm approach) and blog post (about a calm approach in business) to learn more.

What to expect?

I still want to continue producing small snippets of content for people interested in what’s happening in my life, expat stories, useful tips, and travel. I have mainly been using IG stories for that purpose, but I remembered about this newsletter and think it would be a perfect replacement.

Instead of posting immediate IG stories, I plan to post periodic newsletter issues (I'm unsure about the schedule yet) with a summary of recent events or thoughts. The content will supplement the main long-formats like my YouTube channel and Blog. Of course, I’ll also share it here when the long formats are published.

For example, I spent the last three weeks in Cluj, Romania, and enjoyed the city. So, the next few issues will be about my adventures in this city, my crazy attempt to cross Europe from west to east without using planes, and how it turned into a disaster. There will be a video about Cluj, but it will be more of an overview of living in the city, and here, you’ll hear the details.

In addition, I’ll share some useful things I discovered along the way, such as films, content, products, and more.

I am super excited about writing regularly again, and I have always hated pressuring my thoughts into IG stories format.

Where to read

You can read this by simply subscribing to the newsletter on this page:

Thanks for reading Dmitrii - Slow and Steady! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You can also read those stories using the Substack official app.

Thank you, and see you in the next issue! If you have any thoughts or ideas, always feel free to leave a comment or reply to this email.

Finding a place to rent in the Netherlands can be daunting, especially for expats new to the country.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the process, sharing valuable insights to streamline your apartment search. These tips will prove invaluable whether you're a first-timer or have lived in The Netherlands before

In case you prefer visual content, I have made a video about renting in the Netherlands:

Temporary Living Options

Upon your arrival in the Netherlands, two essential questions arise:

• Where can you stay while searching for a permanent place?
• Is it feasible to secure accommodation online before arrival?

Temporary living options include hotels, Airbnb, or employer-provided housing if available. If you’re not lucky enough to have an employer that pays for the accommodation, I’d recommend focusing on hotels and Airbnb. They may be pricier but save you time and hassle, allowing you to focus on finding a permanent residence.

You should always look for accommodation for at least a month because many places offer quite nice discounts for monthly stays. The Netherlands is a bit weird, and the hotels here often cost less than Airbnb because of many regulations regarding short-term rent and Airbnb specifically. So I would recommend checking the hotels first.

Here are a few examples of hotels and apartments that offer monthly deals for rent in big cities.

The Hague

• The Social Hub—When we arrived in The Hague, we stayed in this hotel for a month. It was very good value for money and of good quality.
• 348 Suites Short Stay - Studio apartments with a monthly discount

The Rotterdam

• Le Petit Marin Boutique Hotel - Budget monthly-stay friendly hotel
• The Hendrick - Monthly-rent studio with kitchen

Amsterdam

• Greenstay - Apartment complex with monthly short-term rentals
• Bob W Oosterpark - More expensive hotel with monthly-friendly stays

Utrecht

• Badhuis Hotel - Monthly-stay friendly hotel with bathtub
• UtrechtCityApartments - Studio apartments for short stay monthly rent with kitchen

Finding a place online will be challenging because most rental properties in big cities in The Netherlands have tens of applicants. They always pick the best tenant for the case; of course, the person not even in a country will be considered the last.

If you choose this route, you’ll be very limited to the lower-quality places. Be ready to apply to many places and get many declines. When I say many, I truly mean hundreds of applications. If you don’t care which city to move to, you have a slightly higher chance, but I would still recommend searching for a place offline if possible.

Finding a place to rent in the Netherlands

Satellite cities

Choosing the right city is crucial. Of course, many people probably already know where they’re moving to because of work or university. But if you struggle to find a place inside your goal town, consider satellite cities. For example, cities like Almere, Hoofddorp, or Zaandam would be very nice if you worked in Amsterdam.

The Dutch train system offers a viable alternative to living in the city centers.

Researching Neighbourhoods

While it's not necessary to restrict yourself to one specific neighborhood, having a list of preferred areas or those to avoid is beneficial.

You can take advantage of some resources online for gathering information about areas:

• HoodMaps is a side project of Nomadlist for researching areas for digital nomads. You can pick any city and see the neighborhoods. It's fully crowdsourced so that you can find some unfavorable things written about the areas. But it can give you an approximate idea of what a specific area is about.
• Mapitout is a great resource, especially if you have to travel to work. You can select any destination, type of transport, and time you’re willing to spend on the commute. The map then calculates all the areas within the desired distance of the place on the desired transport—great idea and service.
• huizenzoeker.nl—This resource is mostly created for people buying houses, but you can find a lot of great information there. It shows the type of areas according to city planning, like commercial, living, or agricultural areas. Seeing the closest schools or kindergartens might be useful if you have kids. Also, you can find the closest supermarkets, public transportation stations, and even statistics about home burglaries. The website is fully in Dutch, but you can figure it out using online translation.

Despite these great services, I strongly recommend walking to the areas yourself and getting a feel for them. It’s almost impossible to really understand an area until you've walked there. It’s another advantage of searching for an apartment while physically present in the Netherlands.

When we arrived, we spent weekends and evenings just walking around different areas of The Hague and imagining life there. We did the same when we were picking the city and area to purchase a house later.

It’s worth noting that the Netherlands is a very well-built and safe country. So, even if you don’t thoroughly research the area, you’ll probably be in a good place. In a few years of living here, I barely saw “bad neighborhoods.” They certainly exist, but they are very rare.

Creating Your Apartment Wishlist

Another list you will need to create is your house Wishlist for a future rental. What do you want from the apartment?

Furniture in the apartment

Do you want the apartment to be fully furnished or not?

The main types of apartments in the Netherlands are furnished (gemeubileerd), semi-furnished (gestoffeerd), and unfurnished (kaal).

Remember that unfurnished can mean completely empty boxes, sometimes lacking even basic flooring, which you will need to install. Yeah, yeah, you read it right—no floor!

Semi-furnished, which is what most expats who stay for at least several years want. You will probably have a fully functional bathroom/kitchen with appliances. But the bedroom and living room will be empty. But you usually will have a floor 😎

Furnished apartments are a bit rarer but not impossible to find. They are a great choice if you are coming to The Netherlands for a short period or don’t want to spend money on furniture. However, they will be more expensive.

Other features of the rental

Other things to consider are the size of the place, the number of bedrooms you need, and the amenities you want inside the building. Dutch people love spending time outside, so there is a big chance that you will find terraces, balconies, roof decks, common outside areas, etc.

Maybe you even want to rent a proper house instead of an apartment. Keep in mind that houses are much more expensive to rent. You can’t rent a house unless you're a house-owner and have fully paid off your mortgage or have a special rental type of mortgage, so houses are a rare find.

Companies often own apartment buildings, and they rent out the whole building. It might be a bit easier to deal with a big company instead of a person, especially if you’re new to the country.

Of course, you will also want to write down your price range. More on that below.

Now, you need to start applying for viewings.

Rental Websites

Funda.nl is a go-to platform for property listings in the Netherlands, both buying and renting.

More recourses exist, such as pararius.com or local websites like perfectrent.nl in Rotterdam.

Helper websites do some of the job for you, like rentslam.com, which might be good if you’re busy. But I would focus on Funda first.

Funda UI is very straightforward and supports the English language, so you won’t have a hard time understanding it. Sometimes, the apartment description is in Dutch, but you can use an online translator to understand it.

Their mobile application is also very good because it lets you view a map of your location and nearby properties.

Make sure you’re using Funda's filters using your wishlist. They are pretty advanced, so you can easily set everything you want and save it. For saved filters, you can also set up a newsletter with the properties appearing daily so you won’t miss them. Or you can browse it yourself every day.

Applying for viewings

Applying for a viewing is usually pretty straightforward and instructed in the listing. You can either use the "Plan a viewing” button on Funda or contact the agent directly, again, either via the website form or by calling them.

In a big competition cities, I always recommend calling. Don’t worry, 99% of real estate agents speak English so you won’t be forced to speak your bad Dutch with them.

After the application, they can ask for the documents right away or maybe signup on a specific website. Sometimes they ask for documents after the viewings taken place.

Another tip is never to be late for viewings. It’s considered rude in the Netherlands to be late, and most viewings have a very tight schedule. They allocate each 15 minutes for a new potential tenant, so you might miss your slot.

Rental Costs

It’s really hard to share the rental price you may expect here. It varies widely based on cities/areas/apartment sizes/amenities, etc. You should start using Funda right away and see the prices yourself.

Personal Experience

In The Hague, a 72m² apartment in a nice and quiet area near the beach line, we rented for €1670 per month in 2022 (including the service costs of the building).

This semi-furnished, very good-condition apartment was in a newly renovated building. However, it was far from the city center of Hague, which is around 25 minutes by bike or tram.

But when we left in 2023, the price increased to ~€1800 per month for the same apartment. And the place was already rented out in a week after it was published on Funda.

I don’t want to scare you, but the Dutch housing market crisis is real. The lack of housing supply and many expats drive prices up, especially in the Randstad area and other major cities.

Don’t forget to budget for the additional costs as well. Plus, if you want to buy furniture in your apartment, it also requires some additional budgeting.

Additional costs for rental

Keep in mind that for people who have just arrived in the country and don’t have any tax history here, the owners can ask for a 2- 3 month deposit in advance, in addition to the first month's rent. The deposit will be returned only after you leave the apartment, so make sure you have additional savings for that.

Also, remember to budget for additional expenses such as energy bills, Internet, and possible building service costs (like maintenance or cleaning). My cost of living guide covers this and a bit more about rental prices.

After creating your perfect list, be ready to give something up. It’s very hard to find a perfect place, especially with the current housing crisis in the country, unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money on rent, of course.

Affordable and Social Housing

You might want to check affordable and social housing programs if you have a lower income.

Social housing is a program for people with lower incomes. In 2024, the requirement is to have an income of less than €47,699 for one person and €52,671 for a family. In that case, you can apply for special rental places. Social housing is apartments that cost €879.66 or less.

It's a great benefit, but as I heard, the waiting time for approval is quite long. However, it's worth the research if you fit into the category.

Another category that only exists in some municipalities is affordable housing. It's a middle step between social housing and the regular free market. You need to research a bit more on the municipality website, but I can tell you this program exists in The Hague (Read more on denhaag.nl).

The Hague requires an income of less than €62,191 for a single person or €82,921 for a family in 2024. This permit is much easier to get, at least in The Hague, and you can start looking for apartments right after applying for it.

This opens up much more affordable apartments. The prices of the apartments are usually lower than €1116.85 in 2024. However, sometimes, they could be higher because it applies to selected houses based on a specific score system, but they are more affordable. So, if you see an apartment for €1200 but still marked as a housing permit, don't be surprised.

If you are not eligible for affordable housing, it’s good to know about this, too. Some listings on Funda may have a note “Permit required.” That is exactly about this program. You may skip those listings because you won’t be able to rent them with a higher salary.

Application Process and Documentation

After viewing potential apartments, be ready to apply promptly. Follow the real estate agent's instructions and provide all requested documents promptly.

Typical documents include:

• ID or passport
• Work contract and employer statement
• Salary slips and bank statements
• BRP extract (Municipal Personal Records Database)
• Previous tenant statements

Additional documents like a balance sheet and tax returns might be required for self-employed individuals.

Tenant Laws and First-Time Renters

Tenant laws in the Netherlands are stringent, leading to comprehensive document requests. As a first-time expat, you may face additional challenges due to the lack of established tax and salary history.

Persistence Pays Off

Continue your search even after applying for a place. Persistence increases your chances of securing your desired apartment.

Reviewing and Signing the Contract

Thoroughly read and understand your rental contract, which should outline terms, payments, apartment contents, and maintenance responsibilities. Contracts may be provided in both Dutch and English.

If you have any doubts, I would recommend not signing up for an apartment or consulting with your company or at least a Dutch person you know. It’s better to spend a bit more time on a search than be part of some scam or face some issues in the future.

Final thoughts

After moving in, you must register with the municipality and establish utility contracts. These steps are essential for a smooth transition into your new home. I’ll cover these steps in a future article and video.

Navigating the Dutch rental market can be challenging, but with the right knowledge and persistence, you’ll find a place to call home. I hope this guide has been instrumental in your apartment search.

If you’re considering transitioning from renting to buying a home in the Netherlands, my book "Guide to Buying a House in the Netherlands" is the ultimate guide you need. It provides detailed insights, practical tips, and exclusive resources to help you make informed decisions and navigate the buying process with confidence. Don’t let the complexities of the Dutch housing market hold you back. Get your copy today and start your journey towards owning your dream home in the Netherlands!

You might follow me on YouTube for more content.

Happy apartment hunting!

Yesterday was my last day at my job. I am finally taking a leap of faith to pursue my long-awaited dream of working on "my own thing".

What’s the plan, Dima?

Well, I genuinely enjoyed my job and the team I worked with. But deep down, I knew employment was not what I envisioned to do with my life, and I always wanted to "do my own thing."

Life has been crazy in the last few years, but it's finally slowing down, and I am in a perfect place now and ready to take this leap of faith.

I will work in two directions: youtube videos and digital products (mainly SaaS). I have many ideas for products and monetization of YouTube videos, so tons of experimentation is coming.

So like, how do you even afford that?

My wife and I are both very good at savings and investments. We have been following FIRE principles for a while. But the idea of fully retiring and doing nothing always felt so weird to me.

So, instead of going after my ultimate FIRE number, I am pulling the plug earlier, and instead of retiring, I am using the money to invest in this journey.

I reallocated some portion of the portfolio into more liquid assets, and it should last me for 3 years of living expenses.

That's my self-imposed deadline for establishing sustainable income streams before I need to dig deeper into my investments. I would prefer to avoid this scenario.

Why not combine it with your job? Double the fun, double the hustle!

I tried this way but could never focus entirely and dedicate the time and effort I truly wanted for my projects.

This is also the fastest way to burn out, in my opinion. It inevitably leads to the struggle in some parts of your life. It's your personal life, day job, or projects. I think life is too short for these sacrifices. Plus, I am already in my 30s; the older I get, the more I value time over money.

I also made a video about it.

I am very excited. I will share everything on Twitter and my new YouTube channel, where I want to document everything happening on my journey. 🚀

Follow along if you're curious!

It's 2024 already, and it's time to check with my annual resolutions.

Last year, I posted a video about my 2023 goals, but this year, I decided just to make a post.

2023 was quite an exciting year. I didn’t meet many of my annual resolutions, but many great things happened.

The first and most significant thing was buying a house in the Netherlands 🏡

This took much energy in the spring and summer, but we did it successfully and moved to our new home in July.

That’s a significant life change after renting my whole life, and I am super happy we went through with it.

In addition, I had a few goals in terms of savings and investing. I exceeded the plans, saved much cash, and invested some money 💰

This achievement will allow me to make an exciting shift in my work life next year.

My health goals of weight weren’t met at all, but I started making some positive changes in my relationship with sports, food, and alcohol.

I stabilized my running/biking routines and am planning to push even more this year, so it’s a matter of time before the changes come.

Most of the travel was in Europe, primarily on trains. I also traveled around the Netherlands, searching for a city to buy a house.

Highlights:

• Italian Alps snowboarding 🇮🇹
• Trip to Lille 🇫🇷
• Trip to amazing Hamburg 🇩🇪
• Sziget festival + camping in Budapest 🇭🇺
• Bike camping in Hoge Veluwe 🇳🇱

The side project goals weren’t that successful.

First, YouTube. I only managed to publish 20 videos on YouTube (instead of the planned 40), but at least I got monetized on my main channel this year.

I spent some time working on Taco Digest at the beginning of the year, and it increased MRR a bit. But it started cooling down closer to the end of the year since I didn’t work on it later.

I didn’t launch any other products and focused on making videos instead 🎥

One of the most significant decisions I made last year will happen in March, and I will post more about this later.

I’ll reflect on my goals in the first 3 months of 2024. Some were already determined, and some I still have to plan. 🚀

From the soon-to-happen cool things.

For the first time since moving to the Netherlands, I am going on a nomading trip. I go to Valencia 🇪🇸 in February and stay there for a month.

I’ll post videos and talk about living in the city I heard so much about.

Since October last year, I have been taking a little hiatus from all social media to reflect on my life, but I'll slowly return this year.

I hope you had a great year and will have an even better one in 2024! 🎉

What are your goals for 2024?

Introduction

It’s been over a year since I set foot in The Netherlands. Today, I want to discuss the costs of living in this amazing country. Is life here as pricey as it's often made out to be? Let’s dive into the answer, but first, a quick disclaimer.

This is my personal experience and your costs may vary a lot. Life in any country can be as expensive or as cheap as you make it. It always depends on many factors and it’s always different from person to person. Here, I’m just sharing my experience that can give you an idea of what to expect. A few inputs.

We’re a family of two without kids or pets (hopefully the last one will change soon 🐶). I consider ourselves a frugal couple but we also don’t go to extremes for savings. Most of our hobbies require little to no money at all and we’re quite content with our lifestyles. Most of our time we lived in The Hague but recently moved to Zwolle.

Now, let’s dive into the numbers.

Just in case you prefer video content to reading, I've made a video covering the cost of living in the Netherlands. This video has the latest data and is relevant for 2025:

Rent

Rent is a significant part of our monthly expenses. This category strictly depends on the area of rent. In general, rent is quite expensive here in the Netherlands, and in 2023 the housing crisis is at its peak. However, the location still has the biggest impact on the rent price. The highest rent is, of course, in the biggest cities inside the Randstad area. Amsterdam, Leiden, and Utrecht are considered the most expensive cities here, including some of Amsterdam's satellite cities like Haarlem. They are followed by slightly cheaper but still expensive cities like Rotterdam, The Hague, Eindhoven, Maastricht, and Breda. Lastly, there are many more cities with slightly cheaper rent, depending on the location and proximity to the main cities.

In The Hague, in 2022, we paid €1670 per month for a 72m² apartment in a very nice area near the beach. It was quite an expensive area despite being far from the city centre (about 30 minutes by bike). But we really liked living near the sea, so it was worth it.

In 2023, we left the apartment when we bought our house, but I know that rent went up even more to €1850 for the same apartment.

In smaller cities, I have seen listings for as low as €1000 per month, but I doubt you can find anything cheaper than this in the country for a private space. Renting a room could be an option if you have a smaller budget.

Also, some municipalities have programs like affordable housing (Den Haag has this program, for example). In case your income is lower than a certain amount, you can apply for specific subsets of apartments that aren’t available for people with higher incomes. It’s definitely worth looking into.

For more detailed information on renting in the Netherlands, check out my comprehensive guide on renting.

Utilities

Another significant topic of conversation here is the cost of utilities, especially gas. Due to the global situation, gas prices have increased quite a lot in recent years, and you can receive a substantial invoice if you’re not particularly careful with your heating in winter time.

For our rental apartment, we have the same provider for gas and electricity, and we paid a predetermined fee of €250 per month. But this is not the actual price of our usage. In the Netherlands, the recalculation of the costs happens once a year. If you actually used less than you paid for, you get a refund, and if you used more, they charge you to the difference.

We overpaid by quite a bit - around €1500. After a certain time (around 9 months), you can also adjust monthly payments if you have already paid more, and we set monthly payments to just €40. We have been using more than this but since we already overpaid it was used as compensation. At the end of our contract, we also got around €820 back.

I checked the invoices for the year and eventually we paid around €90 per month for gas and electricity.

Last year there was also a nice bonus from the Dutch government. Because the prices were so high for a while, they sent everyone €380 as a kind of “sorry that the prices are so high”. It was a very nice surprise. The prices went down since then, by the way, but they are dynamic and constantly changing, even depending on the season, so they can go up this winter again.

Another utility is water, but it’s relatively cheap and we paid €18 per month contract price and I think even got a few dozen euros back.

Eating Out and Drinking Out

Eating and drinking out is extremely expensive in the Netherlands. I immediately realized that if I want to save money here, I need to cut this down to a minimum. It was hard at first, especially because I lived for so long in cheap countries where I ate out twice a day. But then I got used to it and it’s actually quite nice to eat home-cooked food. And I bought a coffee machine to stop buying coffee at the cafes.

Even at very cheap restaurants, a meal could easily cost €10-15 without a drink. It grows exponentially as you go to better quality places. Coffee costs around €4 for an americano so if you’re a coffee lover it can add up a lot as well.

For the last 18 months, on average we spent around €350 as a couple, meaning it’s about €175 for one person per month. Keep in mind, it also includes eat-outs from our travels so it’s not all from the Netherlands, but the majority is.

Groceries

Grocery prices are a bit more expensive than I’m used to but I’d say it’s not critically different from other countries. I noticed that usually locally produced products are a bit cheaper and imported stuff is a bit more expensive so each region in the world has both. It’s hard to find very cheap fruits here but in South East Asia it’s hard to find proper and cheap cheese and there are a lot of good cheese in Holland.

We usually buy everything on promotion and participate in many different store programs at Albert Heijn, which is our absolute favorite store not only in the Netherlands but ever. It’s not the cheapest one here but with all the promotions, we get pretty close to cheap chains.

On average we spend around €380 / month on groceries which comes down to €190 per person.

Transportation

Transportation is considerably expensive in the Netherlands. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about personal transportation like cars and trains, or public transportation. But of course there is one big deal that can save you a lot of money on transportation - bikes! The Netherlands has the best bike lane system in the world and I couldn’t have even imagined before coming here, how great it is. You can set a route from point A to point B and there will be a bike route on that path with a 100% guarantee.

To make it even more convenient and travel even longer distances, we bought ourselves e-bikes that can go up to 25km/h and travel for 60-80km on one charge. It’s a truly amazing country if you like biking.

I don’t remember the last time I needed to use public transportation within the city because I bike all the time. But even if you need one, the public transportation system here is really good too. You have buses and trams within the city and the train system is amazing between the cities. You can usually get to any big city from another very quickly. Of course, the Netherlands is a small country so it helps.

But as I already mentioned, it’s usually not a cheap ride. As an example, a train from The Hague to the Airport costs around €10 and takes 30 minutes on a fast train.

The main train company is called NS (short for Nederlandse Spoorwegen) with a few smaller companies for additional routes here and there. Make sure to check their discount and subscription systems as well, it can save you a lot of money.

Buses and trams costs depend on the distance but sometimes the calculation is not very obvious. I once took a tram for a short trip of 7 minutes and it cost me €1.50. But then I took a bus from our apartment to the City Center (around 30 minutes) and it cost me €2.50.

On average we are spending €150 / month for transportation, or €75 per person.

Internet and Phone Plans

Fiber connections are quite common here at home so the quality of the Internet is pretty good. I’ve also never had issues with mobile connections. You can have 5G almost everywhere, even in rural areas. In The Hague, we used Ziggo Internet and now after buying a house we switched to T-Mobile (they actually rebranded now as Odido). I cannot recommend Ziggo so if you have a chance to pick any other provider, do it.

When you have a new address, you usually can get a pretty nice discount for the first year or two. We are currently paying €25 / month for 400Mbit/s fiber optic. I think the regular price is €40 / month and it'll automatically switch to this price after one year.

Mobile connection, we both have is Tele-2 (They’re now also part of Odido) and we pay €14 / month each for 10Gb of traffic. You usually also get some additional GB or discount if you have the same provider at home and for your mobile. It gave us additional €5 discount for the home Internet and additional 5Gb of traffic for mobile.

If you need more data, I think unlimited plans cost around €25 / month. I don’t use it much so even 15Gb is overkill for me. All plans also include 200 minutes of calls and SMS. To be honest I didn’t remember when I used regular calls last time but it’s included in all plans so you can’t opt out.

A few useful links:

• At this website you can compare Internet and TV providers at your address. I also recommend ordering the service via them, you’ll get some additional bonuses like cash back. The website is totally legit and I always ordered via them.
• Similar website for comparing mobile plans.

Healthcare

It’s mandatory to have health insurance here in the Netherlands and after the arrival for the first time, you have 4 months to arrange it for yourself or you’ll get a fine.

Insurance price goes up year after year but for 2023, we both pay €141 / month for the basic insurance and a few additional packages: basic dental coverage for up to €250 and health insurance abroad. Abroad package is really cheap and costs additional few euros but dental adds around €20-25 to the price.

In 2022, the same insurance package costs us €124 so it goes up quite a bit.

This website is amazing for comparing insurances and they can give you some additional small coverage if you order via them. I always do this.

So for two people we spend €282 / month on health insurance.

If you are looking for a great insurance for digital nomads and travelers, check out SafetyWing:

Entertainment

It’s one of the categories that you should take with a grain of salt. It’s very personal and can be as low as €0 and as high as thousands of euros per month if you really like to go places. Most of our spendings contain video games, concerts, and board games. Maybe some occasional museum or other attractions but it’s rather rare. This category also excludes any travel we have.

On average, we spend around €100-€150 / month on different types of entertainment.

What I Excluded

Travel

There is no separate travel category in this article at all because it’s an absolutely unpredictable expense. It could be €0 for months in a row and then some expensive trip will happen. But I want to give you a brief review about travel costs as well.

In general, traveling in Europe could be cheap on planes (although it’s not as cheap as it used to be) but more expensive on the trains. I prefer train travel so I usually pay a bit more. I just can’t stand the hustle of the airports unless I absolutely have to go through it.

Some train destinations could be cheaper than others. For example, there is a fixed price to travel to Belgium from the Netherlands and it’s always €24 if you manage to catch the cheapest train. Traveling to Western Germany is also not expensive. You can find trains to Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, or even Hamburg for less than €50 euro one way. Same goes for Northern France like Lille. But some places could be very expensive like London or Paris. Trains there usually cost €100 or €150 per trip.

Accommodation in Western Europe can be quite expensive too. We usually book the cheapest hotel we can find but it always costs us around €100 per night stay.

Other Expenses

There are a few more categories that I don’t think matter for the general purposes of this article. This includes any of my business expenses, subscription expenses, charities, gifts, parents support and also legal and document fees. The latter was mostly happening when we were moving to Holland and not much afterwards. I’ve also excluded shopping because it’s not directly related to the Netherlands and it varies a lot.

Total

So let’s get into the total numbers!

For two expat people living in the Netherlands we spend around €3125 per month.

This number is based on the rent price. Currently we purchased a house and it’s a topic for a separate blog post. So I figured I give you a number with rent for now, especially because it’s more useful for expats who’re only arriving in the country.

I also calculated the number for one person (not all the costs can be cut down in half) and I got €2455 for a single. The price is very high because I use the same rent price. But maybe for one person you can actually get a smaller place or even a room so it’ll be lower.

Don’t forget to add your regular travel or shopping expenses to the number and you’ll get a picture. The number is still very subjective but I hope it’ll give you some idea.

Cost of Living in Other European Cities

To make it a bit more useful I’ve also decided to make a small comparison with the cities in Europe. I used numbeo.com which is probably the best place for cost of living and first I filled our situation in their estimator.

It gave me €2840 per month for two people living in The Hague. Which is a bit cheaper than we’re spending. But this way we can compare apples to apples and I use the same settings to other cities and here's what I got:

• Den Haag 🇳🇱 - €2840
• Valencia 🇪🇸 - €2054
• Tallin 🇪🇪 - €2147
• Warsaw 🇵🇱 - €2288
• Lisbon 🇵🇹 - €2684
• Barcelona 🇪🇸 - €2733
• Helsinki 🇫🇮 - €2753
• Vienna 🇦🇹 - €2837
• Berlin 🇩🇪 - €3388
• Prague 🇨🇿 - €3409
• Milan 🇮🇹 - €3539
• Munich 🇩🇪 - €3647
• Amsterdam 🇳🇱 - €3649
• Paris 🇫🇷 - €3740
• Copenhagen 🇩🇰 - €3790
• London 🇬🇧 - €4781

These are actually pretty interesting results for me because it seems like the Netherlands (outside of Amsterdam) is not as expensive as many people think if we compare it to other (especially large) cities in Europe. It’s still not cheap of course. But considering that Holland has quite high salaries compared to other EU cities, it makes it a nice balance.

It was a good quarter for growth but I still struggle with the consistency.

I realised that posting monthly reports is too frequent for me. So, I have decided to switch to quarterly check-ins.

🔬 Some stats:

📈 Growth:

✅ +35.5k views (+176%)

✅ +2.6k hours (+240%)

✅ +262 subs (+145%)

💰 €17.19 revenue (first month of monetisation)

🗯️ Engagement:

✅ +115 comments (vs 45)

✅ +187 shares (vs 118)

✅ +1083 likes (vs 407)

I've only managed to publish 4 videos in 90 days, which is waaay less than I had planned. From now on, my goal is to publish weekly videos. Consistency is the main goal for the next three months.

If you've made the decision to visit Georgia, or even stay long-term, this guide is for you. Whether you're a digital nomad like me or considering Georgia as your home base, I want to share my experience of finding accommodation in the beautiful city of Tbilisi.

If you prefer video content, be sure to check out my YouTube video on renting an apartment in Tbilisi:

Arrival and short-term rental in Tbilisi, Georgia

But first things first: after arriving, it's a good idea to rent a short-term place. Finding proper accommodation from abroad can be extremely challenging. I recommend using Airbnb or Booking to find a short-term place for at least one or two weeks. Depending on the season and Tbilisi's current popularity, you may need to rent for an even longer period.

When we moved, we rented a temporary place for one month, which gave us enough time to find a long-term apartment. I also suggest exploring different areas and neighborhoods to find the one that suits you best.

Additionally, Airbnb often offers discounts for stays longer than 28 nights, so you can save some money in the process. If you don't want to spend time searching through Airbnb, you can consider renting a hotel.

Here are some popular hotels in different price ranges that you can find in Tbilisi:

• Boutique Hotel MOJO - great and affordable hotel in the center of Saburtalo

• APART HOTEL - Old Tbilisi 1897 - amazing hotel close to the Old town and immitating old Tbilisi style

• Gallery Art Hotel - modern hotel in the heart of Chavchavadze street in Vake area

Best areas to live in Tbilisi, Georgia

To make things easier for you, I have translated a map of Tbilisi's areas, subway lines, and main streets into English. A big thank you to whoever created it originally.

When it comes to the best areas to live in Tbilisi, there are several top contenders: Vake, Vera, Sololaki, Saburtalo, and Chigureti. Let's explore each one in detail.

Vake

Vake, the second most expensive area in the city after the old town, is known for its elegance and sophistication. When you visit Vake, you'll see people wearing stylish glasses and fancy clothes. The area has tall glass buildings, and Chavchavadze Avenue is famous for its flat terrain. Some say Vake lacks the authentic Georgian charm, but it's still a desirable place to live.

Vake is conveniently located and offers great restaurants, excellent grocery stores, and easy access to buses. It also has beautiful parks. Many new buildings have appeared, providing high-quality apartments. Sometimes, we would go to Vake from our neighborhood just to take leisurely walks and enjoy coffee shops, which are rare in Tbilisi.

I had initially planned to move to Vake, but circumstances led me to leave Tbilisi. However, it remained a favorite place for walks, especially after the complete reconstruction of Vake Park. It became a delightful spot for strolling and even hiking to the top of Turtle Island and beyond. The area offers some great hiking paths.

Vera

Vera is a vibrant neighborhood in Tbilisi that perfectly blends modernity with authentic charm. With numerous restaurants and attractions, Vera offers a central location that is conveniently close to the bustling Vake area. By choosing to stay in Vera, you can enjoy the benefits of being within walking distance to Vake while paying lower rental prices. Additionally, if you're interested in exploring the touristy side of Tbilisi, Vera is situated near the old town, allowing you to easily access all the attractions it has to offer. It's worth noting that this area is popular among expats as well. While the price point in Vera is more affordable than Vake, it remains relatively high due to its prime central location.

Sololaki

This area captures the essence of an old town vibe. It feels like an extension of the old town, but with less touristy attractions and a slightly hipster atmosphere. I discovered several restaurants here that I really enjoyed. There are many vegan and vegetarian options, as well as one of the best craft beer bars and stores in town. Overall, the area is vibrant and lively. You'll also find the famous freedom square here. However, if you prefer a more tranquil setting for your residency, I wouldn't recommend it as it tends to be quite busy. Nevertheless, it's still a fantastic area to live.

Saburtalo

Tbilisi boasts one of the biggest and most popular residential areas, both among locals and expats. While it's a large area, I recommend exploring the eastern part. It offers proximity to everything while still being reasonably priced. As you move west, you'll find fewer activities and attractions. So, if you prefer a less crowded area, head west. Saburtalo, in my opinion, has everything you need for a residential experience: parks, a large shopping mall, and numerous restaurants.

However, do ensure you carefully consider the specific location of your apartment. Due to its size, Saburtalo encompasses various neighborhoods, some of which are a bit run-down, while others are situated on steep hills.

During my time in Tbilisi, I primarily lived in Saburtalo, specifically in a neighboring area known as Jikia House or Jikia neighborhood. Jikia House is a modern micro-neighborhood situated towards the western part of Saburtalo. It comprises 50-60 five-floor red brick buildings constructed by Estonian builders. The quality of everything in this area is commendable, and although it is somewhat secluded and even guarded, the interior design is well-planned. You can explore the entire area on foot without needing to venture outside. The abundance of greenery, along with several restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, and children's playgrounds, adds to its appeal. Overall, I was highly satisfied with my rental experience in this area, and I recommend it, especially for families. In my opinion, there is no better place in Tbilisi for a family to reside.

Chigureti

I love this area, although it can be quite expensive. It's situated in the central part of the city, on the eastern side of the Kura River. The design of the area is perfect, with a blend of beautiful buildings that exude authenticity while also incorporating modern elements. One prominent feature is the famous Fabrika cultural center, which attracts expats and nomads. During the day, it offers coworking spaces and restaurants, while at night, it transforms into lively bars and clubs.

In addition, my absolute favorite local restaurant, Mapshalia, is located here. Another popular street for shopping and hanging out is Marjanishvili. You'll also find the Dinamo Tbilisi football club stadium and the central train station in this area. From here, you can easily travel to other destinations like Batumi.

Other areas

I would recommend checking out a few other districts: Avlabari, Isani, and Didube. Avlabari and Isani are located on the southeast part of the city. Isani is a newer and more affordable area, but it is situated far away from the City Center. Additionally, Didube could be a great option if you're on a tight budget.

No matter where you decide to stay, transportation in Tbilisi is not an issue. Taxis are among the cheapest I've seen in my travels, and public transportation options like the metro and buses work really well and are also affordable. So even if you choose to rent a place a bit outside the City Center, it won't be difficult to reach the center. You can refer to my map above, which also indicates subway stations.

Type of apartments

In Georgia, particularly in Tbilisi, most people live in apartment buildings. Detached houses are also an option, but less popular. The old apartment buildings are typical of post-Soviet countries and have an average size of around 100 square meters for the largest three-bedroom apartments, with smaller sizes for fewer bedrooms. Interestingly, the balcony area is included in the total square meterage, so keep that in mind.

Apartments are often counted by the number of rooms rather than bedrooms. For example, a four-room flat includes the living room and 3 bedrooms. The kitchen is typically located inside the living room, although sometimes they are separate. There are also many small apartments, ranging from 25 to 35 square meters. I have never seen any outdoor areas apart from balconies, which are quite popular. They provide a nice space to enjoy the hot summers in Tbilisi.

Modern buildings are common and resemble those found in many other countries. These tall buildings usually have 15 or more floors and an entrance area with staff working in the hall. They are usually more expensive than older buildings but offer additional amenities such as 24/7 security guards, and sometimes even a gym or pool.

Rental costs

In recent years, apartment prices have significantly increased due to various reasons. However, please take into consideration that the following prices are adjusted for the year 2024, although I rented the place myself back in 2021. Hopefully, the market will cool down in the next few years.

The price range for a small apartment outside the city starts at $250-$300 per month. You may find even cheaper options, but the quality of the place may not be great. In areas closer to the City Center or modern developments like Jikia House that I mentioned before, prices could range from $500 to $800, depending on the apartment size and conditions. In highly popular areas or very modern buildings with amenities, apartments could cost between $1000 and $1500 per month. Houses are even more expensive, with prices starting at $2000+.

The process of searching for a rental

The process of renting the place out is quite straightforward. Typically, the rent goes through a rental agent, and the agent fee is paid by the landlord, so there are no downsides for you. To begin, you call the agent and arrange a viewing appointment on your desired date. If you decide to rent the place, you schedule another meeting, usually with the owner, to sign the contract. Most rental agents are friendly and helpful, but they may not always speak English. If you have friends who speak Georgian or Russian, it would be beneficial to have them assist you. However, if you don't, simply ask as your first question when you call whether they speak English and if they can connect you with someone who does. As Tbilisi grows in popularity, it is becoming easier to find English-speaking agents.

The agreement is fairly standard and can be created in two languages: Georgian and your preferred language, such as English. The contract will have two columns, each containing a different language on either side. It's important to carefully read the contract and agree to all its terms. Ensure there are no hidden fees or unexpected implications that could affect your rental experience. Typically, the minimum duration for a standard contract is six months, and it may be difficult to find one for a shorter period. Ideally, landlords prefer tenants to sign a one-year contract. At the end of the contract, you will need to meet with the landlord again to sign a new contract. Auto-renewal clauses are not commonly found in contracts, as is common in European countries.

Another important thing to note is that you are typically required to pay for the last month in advance as a deposit. This practice is quite common in many countries, so it should not come as a shock.

If you're searching for an apartment in Georgia, the best website to use is ss.ge. It offers various features commonly found on similar websites, such as different filters to refine your search, the ability to search by specific areas, and a map with pictures showing the apartments. Additionally, you'll find contact information for agents. Although there is a chat feature on the website, I personally haven't had much luck using it. If you prefer not to call the agents, you can try finding them on WhatsApp, which is the most popular messenger in Georgia.

It's worth noting that many apartment listings in Georgia display prices in US dollars. This is because major purchases, including rent, are often paid in USD rather than the local currency Lari. Fortunately, all Georgian banks support USD, making it easy to transfer funds to your landlord.

Another option for searching for an apartment is to explore Facebook groups, such as the expat groups Expats in Tbilisi and another Expats in Tbilisi, or Flats For Friends Tbilisi.

Please note that while there are more groups available, it's important to be cautious of scammers. Never make a payment for something without a proper contract. Additionally, there are Telegram chats and groups dedicated to rentals. However, I would recommend sticking with ss.ge, especially if you're not fluent in Russian or Georgian languages.

Another good alternative website to consider is myhome.ge. However, based on my experience, the listings are similar there, so it might be wise to focus on just one website.

When it comes to checking apartments in Georgia, there isn't anything specific related to living in the country that differs from other countries. However, I would recommend ensuring the apartment has air conditioning, as summers in Tbilisi can get really hot. Additionally, having a heating system is essential if you plan to stay during the winter months. Other than these considerations, make sure the apartment meets all your personal needs for daily living. Many apartments in Tbilisi are fully furnished, so you won't have to worry about buying furniture. It's also important to inquire about any additional charges associated with the apartment, such as energy bills or service fees. In Georgia, paid elevators are not uncommon. In modern buildings, you usually have a special card with a subscription payment, while older constructions may require inserting a coin into the elevator machine. Another important aspect to note is the presence of bug nets on windows, as certain seasons in Georgia bring many bugs and mosquitoes, and you certainly don't want them inside your apartment.

The location is also quite important. Although there are no really bad areas in Tbilisi, it's still a good idea to walk around and explore the neighborhoods to get a feel for them. Additionally, be mindful of the hills in Tbilisi. Ensure that your apartment building is not situated on a steep hill, as you wouldn't want to climb it every time you come home.

That's all! I wish you good luck in your apartment search. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, and I'll do my best to assist you.

While this wasn't a significant month in terms of content growth, the most notable achievement was the monetization of my main channel last month! 🚀 After going back and forth with Google support, they finally fixed the issue with my AdSense account and I was able to link the correct one. It took me 40 days of everyday support conversations via email and Twitter, but it’s finally done!

I'm thrilled to be able to focus more on the channel now. Unfortunately, I was feeling a bit down because of monetisation issues this month and didn’t publish as much as I would have liked, which hurt the growth of course. I only published two videos in May.

🔬 Let’s get into the numbers:

📺 Main channel:

🎥 Published just one video in May and it tanked the stats.

Growth:

❌ 6,800 views (-70%)

❌ 485 hours watch time (-73%)

❌ 63 new subscribers (-56%)

💰 €2.34 revenue (only a few days)

Engagement:

❌ 22 comments + 37 shares (vs 70 comments + 39 shares).

📺 Second channel (different language):

🎥 Published only one video.

Growth:

🔵 4100 views (Same)

✅ 316 watch hours (+9%)

✅ 33 new subscribers (+14%)

💰 €2.45 revenue (this channel is in a non-monetizable market).

Engagement:

✅ 17 comments + 50 shares (vs to 8 + 60 in April).

—

This was the final month for my channel in Russian. I will be fully concentrating on my main one. I am going to record a video informing subscribers that I am putting that channel on hold.

If they want watching my content, it will be available in English on the main channel so maybe I gain a few subscribers this way. But, I don’t expect much. Russian audience rarely transforms this way.

I'm thrilled with the growth of my main channel. One video, in particular, took off and led to all the growth. I didn't expect it to become popular, but I'm glad it did because I put quite a bit of effort into it.

Looking ahead, I'm excited to soon achieve monetization in May. There is an issue with my AdSense account. My old inactive account was linked to this YouTube channel and I can’t unlinked it. Right now, I am trying to solve this issue with both email and Twitter support.

I'm seriously considering ditching my second channel. Even though it takes up less time than my main one, it's still diverting my focus. I'll make a decision after I get monetization on the main channel.

🔬 Let's dive into the numbers.

📺 Main channel:

🎥 I've published just two videos.

Growth:

✅ 22,400 views (+472%)

✅ 1,700 hours watch time (+680%)

✅ 143 new subscribers (+496%)

Engagement:

✅ 70 comments + 39 shares (vs 14 comments + 31 shares in March).

📺 Second channel (different language)

🎥 Only one video was published.

Growth:

❌ 3700 views (-7%)

✅ 282 watch hours (+9%)

✅ 25 new subscribers (14%)

💰 $1.80 revenue (this channel is in a non-monetizable market).

Engagement:

❌ 8 comments + 60 shares (vs to 17 + 46 in March).

The main goal for May is to consistently publish four videos throughout the month and figure out monetization. I'm really curious to see the current RPM for this channel.

Welcome to November everyone! 🍁

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

The weather in Holland still doesn't feel like November to me, to be honest. So far I feel that people were lying to me about the weather here. This weekend it was +20 and sunny. Maybe it's just a rare year but I'm loving it.

On the weekend we made our first long bike trip to Leiden. It's another city we wanted to explore and potentially consider buying a house in.

The city is around 25km from The Hague one way so it was quite a trip. Also, because Europe changed to winter time we didn't plan it properly and ended up going back in the dark. We had to bike through the national park along the coast back home. The downside is it doesn't have any lights. It was completely dark except for the lights on our bicycles.

Overall, the trip was amazing. We absolutely enjoyed the city. I've already praised Utrecht in the last post but we loved Leiden even more. It looks like Amsterdam with half of the city center filled with canals but much more cozy and comfortable. Fewer tourists and more local life.

Moreover, I had an impression it has more nice residential areas around the city with great accessibility to the city center and train station.

Unfortunately, despite being much smaller than popular Dutch cities, it's still in the same "expensive" category of housing. I think it's our favorite so far anyway.

I still can't wrap my head around how great residential areas in The Netherlands are. Even small towns with a couple of thousand population still have such beautiful areas to live in. That's why I don't worry about where we end up buying a house — it'll be nice almost anywhere. It's quite hard to find a bad area here.

📺 YouTube

I recently restarted my Russian channel on YouTube and published a new video. This video was the fastest‑viewing video I've ever had.

It hit 1k views in less than 24 hours and kept growing. After 4 days it had around 4.1k views. It proves my theory that in Russian I can make better and faster‑growing videos and there’s less competition.

The downside, of course, is revenue. Views from Russia are not monetizable so it only gets money from abroad which isn't much.

You can see this video only has ~$0.5 RPM (dollars per 1000 views) which is ridiculous. But as the channel grows I'll think of other ways to monetize it.

I want to hit monetization with my English channel to compare RPM between the two since it's the same content.

👷 Taco Digest and other projects

This is quite an important week for my other project Taco Digest. I am planning to increase pricing and completely remove free accounts. I don't think it's sustainable to support them — at least at this stage. Curious to see if it'll lead to new subscriptions or not.

In general, I’m planning to spend a bit more time on Taco Digest from now on and make my way to version 2 of the project.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

📺 I'm watching the second documentary from Ewan McGregor and his friend traveling on motorbikes. This one is called Long Way Down and they travel from the UK down to South Africa. Not as interesting as the first movie but still pretty cool.

👾 I'm on the 40th hour of Horizon Forbidden West and the game is still amazing. Especially the level design and how beautiful it is. The story is also quite interesting.

🎲 We also bought a new board game (I think we're addicted now) called Dune Imperium. It's themed in the Dune universe but doesn't have much to do with it. It's similar to Terraforming Mars I talked about before.

PS We even ordered a second coffee table from IKEA to play more comfortably 😂 Our current one runs out of space from time to time.

As usual, hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client, and have a great week!

Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱

Hey!

We reached a small milestone — it's the 10th issue of my newsletter! 🥳

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

Nothing much happened since last week. Mostly trying to get back to my routine and experimenting with it. So far so good — I'm managing to spend around 1–1.5 hours editing videos before work. Wednesday and Saturday are for side projects. I like this regime.

We have plans to buy a house next year. Hence, we decided it was time to start exploring Dutch cities and their residential areas. This Sunday we made a trip to Utrecht and the city is amazing. Let's get to it in the travel section.

Also, I can't stop enjoying the weather in the Netherlands. Everyone was saying the only downside of the country is the climate but it's amazing. Fall started at the end of October and the temperature is around +12 – +15 every day. We couldn't even dream about this back in Russia. It doesn't rain as much as people were saying — maybe we're lucky though. Let's see what Dutch winter feels like.

🧳 Travel

Utrecht is somewhat in the middle of the country and Randstad (the most populated region).

We traveled there by train which took us around 30 minutes from The Hague Central station. The city is absolutely beautiful. It has canals like Amsterdam but also many modern buildings like Rotterdam. In my opinion, its canals are even better than Amsterdam’s. They have two levels and some people even live right on the first level.

The city center is very vibrant — hundreds of cafes and bars everywhere. It's so hipstery compared to The Hague.

Utrecht has made our list of cities for a potential move. We went to explore different areas with the housing app in hand. But the city turned out to be quite expensive in the central areas. Next time we visit, we need to explore more areas with affordable housing.

In general, I’d recommend visiting Utrecht instead of Amsterdam if you want to enjoy a Dutch city.

PS I even published my first Reel on Instagram about Utrecht.

📺 YouTube

This week I published a new video. It's my last video about Georgia and I compare the two largest cities in the country — Tbilisi and Batumi.

I spent some time coming up with this thumbnail but it turned out to be worth it. The video so far has one of the highest click‑through rates on the channel (7.3%). And in general, it's performing well, sitting in second place among the last 10 videos by views.

💻 Cool purchase

I've already been raving about the Terraforming Mars board game but we bought another one: Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — and it's even better!

It's a so‑called "dungeon crawler" which reminds me of D&D games but still a bit different. The game is so well written and has so many interesting mechanics you can't stop playing. Highly recommended, especially if you like Fantasy or RPGs.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

📺 We finished a bunch of Apple TV+ series, so now we’re picking by score. Started Long Way Round — a documentary about Ewan McGregor and his friend riding around the world on motorbikes. Surprisingly interesting. I had this dream to do a trip around the world without planes, so it’s fun to see the challenges. A lot of the route goes through Russian‑speaking countries, so I understand what locals say — they don’t 😀

👾 We completed Mario and started playing Crash Bandicoot 4 on PS5. Not as good as Mario but still fun. It has a pass‑the‑controller mode after each unsuccessful attempt — very old‑school.

📚 Started my first Brandon Sanderson book — Elantris. I’m hooked. The story is gripping and written in simple language so you can dive deep into it.

As usual, hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client, and have a great week!

Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱

I am back with another newsletter.

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

Last week was about traveling. This week let's talk about updates on life in the Netherlands.

First of all, we finally got Internet access to our home. We were trying to get the connection since August when our rent started.

At first, we ordered T‑Mobile internet as it was the cheapest and with the fastest speed. The first available date was a month in advance, and we were sure that was the day we’d get the Internet (August 26).

Nobody came on the date and, after calling tech support, our landlord, and the owner of the building, we discovered it was impossible to install T‑Mobile at our house. In many Dutch cities, T‑Mobile uses KPN’s network—but not in The Hague. They had some arguments and they aren’t friends in our city.

Then we ordered KPN. Everything seemed easy. We already had their box and they sent us all the equipment right away. I couldn't make it work and noticed their box doesn't have any cables except the one coming out of the street. After several calls, no success. They always promised to come “soon,” but no one came. Classic story. They were waiting for some company that waited for another company, etc.

The good thing about KPN is they provided a 4G router with a free SIM card. The downside is it only has 100 GB on it and to update you need to call tech support—and it won't update on weekends. After losing Internet on one weekend, I lost my patience and ordered the last provider available: Ziggo.

Surprisingly, everything worked almost right away. They sent us a router by post, I connected it, and the Internet just worked! There were a few problems with the cables inside the apartment, but that’s an issue with our building in general.

So today I'm enjoying unlimited and fast connection for the first time in The Netherlands 😂

If you're curious about the price: it’s €33/month with a one‑year contract for 350 Mb/s download and 35 Mb/s upload. It was a promotion and included free TV access that I haven't tested yet. I doubt we'll be watching it much.

The second good thing is we now have ceiling lights in our place. Before that we only had a few old bulbs; a couple even managed to break. Recently we almost didn't have light anywhere.

So we finally put our thoughts together, got IKEA lights, and ordered an electrician. The cool thing about our building is it provides different kinds of work inside the apartment for free, including installation of the lights. They do this because it's easier for them to fix everything when we'll move out. So we're now connected!

📺 YouTube

Last week I restarted my YouTube channel in Russian. I had many thoughts about the current political situation. Eventually, I decided that language shouldn't be linked to the political situation in one specific country. Many people speak Russian outside of Russia and more people than ever are leaving the country as well.

So I figured I can help with my channel—especially because my topics of remote work and living abroad are in demand.

Another reason is I feel much more comfortable speaking in my native tongue. The videos will be of better quality, and that's my essential goal.

If you speak Russian, I recorded and published a more detailed explanation here:

The English channel for sure isn't going anywhere—especially because the Russian channel isn't great for monetization nowadays and my goal is to monetize my work.

Last week I also had an interesting call with a Safety Wings employee and we discussed a potential partnership. We didn't agree on anything yet. We'll get in touch when I get a video with a good match to promote their insurance. It would be great to get my first sponsorship.

💻 Cool purchase

This week I want to praise my new coffee machine. As you can imagine, I've never had a coffee machine because of traveling. Now I finally got one. I’d been researching for some time which one to take and picked Delonghi Magnifica S.

Quite happy with my choice. It sits in the lower‑to‑middle price segment and can't make cappuccinos out of the box. It's okay because I mostly drink black coffee. It can pour hot water which is perfect for making Americanos.

One click of a button for a good coffee in the morning is priceless. The only downside — I started drinking more coffee ☕️

🎁 Content I’m consuming

📺 We continued watching Apple TV+ series. We completed Bad Sisters (Irish dark comedy) and I loved it. I had to watch with English subtitles (because of Irish English), but apart from that, the show is so much fun.

👾 We completed Super Mario 3D World on Switch — an amazing game to play with your partner or friend. Lots of fun evenings!

📚 I also finished reading Neuromancer. The book gets too complicated toward the end. I had to read the plot on the wiki page to completely understand what had happened. Apart from that, it's a classic cyberpunk story, so if you're into that it’s a must. Now I can't wait to start playing Cyberpunk 2077.

As usual, hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client, and have a great week!

Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱

Hey friends!

I missed a few weeks of the newsletter, sorry about that. I had a lot of travel last month and then COVID-19 finally got me for the first time.

🧳 Travel

Let's start with the nicest part. In the last issue, I mentioned that I'm meeting my mom in Estonia 🇪🇪

The original plan was to drive around EU countries and reach as far to the west as we could. Practically, we tested the road on the first day and my mom (not a young girl anymore) couldn't be in the car for long distances. She got tired quickly. So we had to wiggle our plans and decided to drive around Estonia instead.

I actually enjoyed the deep Estonia exploration rather than jumping countries. Otherwise, it would have been a very brief look at cities and most of the time spent on the road.

In Estonia, we spent a few days in the capital of Tallinn which I loved. It has a nice vibe of a big city but is actually quite small.

Then we moved south to Pärnu, supposedly the summer capital of Estonia. But since it was September, the beaches were empty—and it's always a pleasure for me to walk around empty sand.

Afterward, we rented a nice little cabin in the middle of nowhere in Valga County (middle of the country). It was a nice time to relax, take a sauna, and enjoy nature. We also briefly explored Otepää. Turns out it was the winter capital of Estonia because of ski resorts. I guess we visited all three capitals.

Then we visited Tartu, the second biggest city in the country. This city has a totally different vibe from Tallinn. It's a student city and it appeared to me more international. Enjoyed it as well.

Lastly, I drove my mom to Narva which borders Russia so she could go back home. I took my first ferry from Tallinn and sailed to Helsinki 🇫🇮

I haven't seen much of the city but it seemed like a big city, so it needs a bit more time for exploring. In Helsinki, I reunited with my wife and we flew to Stockholm 🇸🇪 where we spent a weekend before moving back home to Holland 🇳🇱

Stockholm was amazing, but once again you probably need more time to explore the city in detail. It was surprisingly similar to The Netherlands. If we had a really big city here it would have been something like Stockholm.

Also, the Stockholm subway is a piece of art. We spent multiple hours traveling to different stations.

Overall the trip was really cool and long. But the huge downside of it was that both my mom and I got COVID-19 somewhere on the road. She had symptoms when we traveled to Tartu. Mine appeared in the middle of our Tartu stay as well. The second half of the trip was a bit cough‑y and fever‑y.

I was sure it was a simple flu but when we arrived home we did a test and both my wife and I had COVID positive results.

The worst part was the weakness after all symptoms were gone. For around a week I felt tired all the time and slept a lot.

Thankfully it's all gone now and I can get back to exciting work like writing this newsletter issue!

💻 Cool purchase

This week I want to praise board games. I always liked them but when you're traveling full time it's almost impossible to bring a proper board game with you.

Now, I finally got my hands on them. My first purchase was Terraforming Mars and the game is so much fun. It's perfect for two players which is always a big deal for us. And it has amazing and smart mechanics allowing endless replayability.

I already ordered a new game but I'll tell you about it after playing—it should be a lot of fun.

📺 YouTube

Looking forward to updating you on this section soon. I have around 5 videos shot already, two of which are from the trip I told you about.

Also, I've decided to revive my channel in Russian. I made an explanatory video on why I decided to do this after 6 months of inactivity and it'll be live on Friday.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

We watched “Severance” last week and the show was absolutely mind‑blowing. It's an amazing sci‑fi in a kinda dystopian world. It's gripping through the whole series with perfect cliffhangers. And the cinematography—oh boy—it's so good.

It's been a while since I enjoyed a TV show so much. I NEED the second season urgently now.

Hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client and have a great week!

Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱

Hey hey! It is my birthday issue! 🎉

I hit 35 today and it feels great. After the mark of thirty, I stopped worrying about my age so much and birthdays became more enjoyable. In my twenties I was always worried about my career, my achievements, my “old age” — but not anymore.

I think 30s is the best time in my life. I don't have any obligations like university or living with my parents. I still have quite a lot of energy and ambitions. And I have more money than I had in my twenties.

Praise the thirties! 🎉

🧳 Travel

The following weeks should be travel‑interesting! 🧳

I'm flying to Estonia on Friday and meeting my mom in Tallinn. She will be in her car so I'm planning to drive her towards the center of Europe. It would be perfect if we manage to drive to Milan in Italy but I understand it could be difficult. My mom is not a young girl anymore so not sure how she feels about long road trips. We'll play it by ear.

The first short‑term goal is to drive to Poland via Latvia and Lithuania. Maybe we can reach Czechia or Hungary from there as well. We didn't book any hotels except the first one in Tallinn.

Estonia already announced that they're closing the entrance for Russian citizens with Schengen visas on the 19th. So our timing couldn't be better. I'm looking forward to this trip because I haven't seen my mom for more than a year.

We also added more plans with my wife after this trip. We're ending the trip with mom on 27th then I have regular work days which I'll spend in Tallinn.

On the 29th I'll travel on a ferry to Helsinki to rejoin my wife. She's also meeting with her parents in Istanbul. Then on the weekend, we're flying to Stockholm. I haven't been to Scandinavia and am quite interested in these countries. Then we're flying back to Holland on the 2nd of October.

I'll be reporting about all the trips in the newsletter and I'm hoping to record a travel vlog out of the trip.

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

Despite all the trips we reached a milestone in our apartment as well. We finally assembled all the furniture from IKEA and threw away all the empty boxes. The house now looks more cozy and pleasant than with all the boxes hanging around the rooms.

It was quite an achievement because we started from scratch and we had zero furniture. In the end, I was sick of the assembling process but I'm happy we did it. We still have a few touches here and there we want to complete but the apartment looks lovely already.

I also finished my office/studio setup and I love it. I always wanted such a place but with traveling it was impossible. It still needs some cable management work though.

From the disappointing news, we still have issues with Internet installation. I was already telling the beginning of the story in the previous issues. How we waited for T‑Mobile and eventually switched to the KPN network provider. But now we're waiting for KPN as well. Turns out they didn't install an optical‑to‑ethernet converter in our box. Now, it's impossible to tell when they manage to do this.

At least they sent us a little 4G modem so now the Wi‑Fi connection is a bit more stable compared to pairing the phone. But it's still annoying that we have to request 2Gb every time we run out of data. There is no real unlimited data here in the Netherlands. All the providers limit you to 10Gb per day and then you have to request 2Gb via the app when they run out (for free). Technically it's unlimited but they also limit it 😂

💻 Cool purchase

This week I got my birthday present earlier and it's Mac Studio! I love my M1 MacBook Air but sometimes it's not enough for work and video editing. Even many Chrome tabs could easily crush its 8Gb of RAM.

But this new machine is an absolute beast. It has an Apple M1 Max chip with 10‑core CPU and 24‑core GPU, 32Gb of unified RAM.

I tried to overload it with everything I have in my workflow and even more but it didn't care a bit. Final Cut works perfectly and smoothly without any freezes. Exactly what I wanted. I'll continue using my laptop for the trips and it's still one of the best laptops I've ever had.

Another awesome thing in Mac Studio is the number of ports. It was always a downside of MacBooks and you have to jump around with a USB dongle to make it work.

My birthday gift came a bit early ☺️

The machine is an absolute beast. Tested it with everything I could, not a little freeze.

— Dima Pashutskii (@guar47) September 12, 2022

📺 YouTube

This week I completed a new video for YouTube as well. I'll publish it on Friday. It's another vlog I recorded back in Georgia when we traveled from Batumi to Tbilisi through the whole country by car.

It was a cool trip so I hope the viewers will enjoy the video. My last vlog didn't have much attention so curious to see how this one performs.

I edited all my previous footage from Georgia so I'll be recording new videos from my studio now! I still have a few ideas for videos about Georgia and then I switch to The Netherlands topic.

Recently I started thinking more about the idea of starting a YouTube channel about video games. It's still an idea and I don't have time for that now. But it's something I would love to explore in the future. I was a video games nerd my whole life and I think I know the industry quite well. So it would be great to try this at some point. I would be interested in reporting video game news and occasional reviews. The last one is much harder if you don't get preview copies.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

We've finished The Boys TV series and it's a fine show. But I noticed that I'm not as impressed as before with their shocking scenes. Despite it feels like they're trying to add more of them I don't feel as amused. Maybe I am used to them or they aren't interesting as before.

I started reading Neuromancer by one of my favorite cyberpunk authors Philip K. Dick. The book is a bit hard to read in English for me but it’s still gripping right from the start.

We tried a board game back in Berlin called Terraforming Mars and we loved it. We purchased it right after we got back from the trip and already played 3 times. It's quite a few considering that each game lasts for about 4+ hours. The game is very interesting and perfectly suitable for 2 players.

Hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client and have a great week!

Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱

Hello hello and happy Wednesday! (I'll never learn to spell this word correctly from the first time).

Today's issue is kinda travel centered. I assume it'll be the case until the end of September because I have quite a lot of trips scheduled.

🧳 Travel

It was a busy week! Last Friday we flew to Berlin and we're still here. I've been to Berlin last time in 2019 and I was looking forward to visiting the city again. I always enjoyed the vibe here. Especially the central areas like Friedrichshain (we live here) and Kreuzberg. To me, Berlin seems like a perfect representation of freedom and a bit of rebellion. Perfect combination if you'd ask me.

Berlin is balancing post-soviet architecture (especially in the eastern parts) with modern buildings. With a lot of graffiti and posters on the walls. People still look amazing and it's interesting to notice how people express themselves. This city is definitely special to me.

It so happened many of my friends and people I know from the Internet live here. So this trip was mostly to meet with friends and have reunions. It was awesome to see everyone again.

We also visited the Moderat concert. I thought about visiting their concert in Amsterdam. But the band is from Berlin so it felt much better to go here. It was a great concert except that the start of it was delayed by two hours. Many people said it's normal for Berlin so just roll with it.

Another thing I've been planning this week is a trip with my Mom. I don't want to go to Russia so she'll drive to Estonia and I fly there in a week. The goal is to make a little road trip with Mom to Western Europe. She's never been anywhere outside of post soviet territories. Unfortunately, the border rules change every day. There is a big chance that in a week Estonia will close the border with Russia for good. So we constantly have to adjust the plans to make everything happen. Hopefully, the Finland border still will open.

📺 YouTube

I finally published a new YouTube video after 3 months break! It's a great feeling I always have when publishing a new video. Although I know it'll probably not perform well. It's a thing about posting videos after the break. YouTube algorithm kinda testing if you're really back and if they should push your content a bit more. So after a break, it usually takes a few videos to get back on track.

Anyway, I'm quite happy about it. It's a video about our trip to Svaneti (a mountain region in Georgia). I recently purchased a good mic and it was the first video where I used background voice on top of b-rolls. Cool experiment and I definitely enjoyed it and will be doing this more in the future. You can write a more thorough script with this technic so the flow is more smooth. When you speak straight to the camera it's harder to follow the script and look natural.

💻 Cool purchase

Since I already mention it, I bought a nice microphone. It's a package of Yeti mic and boom arm called Yeticaster. Mic sounds amazing straight from the source. It was great to use the sound right away without the need for any post-production. But of course, I'll be experimenting with sound tweaking a lot in the future. I need to dive into this on YouTube because I don't know much about sound.

The boom arm is also very nice and sturdy. It took some time to adjust its rigidity but once I did it moved perfectly.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

We completed Little Fires Everywhere and the series is fine. Nothing mind-blowing but it's a solid scenario by, I assume, a good book.

We started the third season of The Boys. The show was always insane but it feels like they are getting to a new hardcore level with each season. The third season is not an exception. Some of the scenes... let's just say I don't recommend watching it while eating. And never watch the show with kids. Apart from that, it's a lot of fun!

I've finished Work Rules! and the book was meeeeh. It feels more like Google hiring advertising rather than a useful book. It has a few insights about Google working culture but I wouldn't recommend spending time on it.

That's it for this week, see you next Wednesday! (made a spelling mistake again) and don't forget to send me anything by hitting the reply button!

--

Written in my friend's apartment in Friedrichshain, Berlin 🇩🇪

Hey there!

I am back with Wednesday's schedule. As promised I'm here with the report from Gamescom 2022 and other adventures in Germany.

Don't forget to hit the reply button to ask me anything or suggest something for the newsletter!

🇳🇱 Travel

The trip to Germany was a bit hectic. Germany is famous for its punctuality but not in the transportation area. All the trains and buses we took along the way were canceled or considerably late. It's not a complaint though, it gave our trip an adventurous vibe. It's an observation and warning if you're planning to go to Germany.

But it all started with the train workers' strike in The Netherlands. We had a train from The Hague to Utrecht at 5 am. Around 4 am we got a message that all trains had been canceled.

It was a good chance to try carsharing in The Netherlands so we drove Sixt to Utrecht. It was my first time driving an electric car (Nissan Leaf). I wouldn't say there's that big of a difference with a gas car, apart from everything being more automatic. But it didn't have the problem electric scooters do—when you turn the gas they immediately go fast. The car starter is smooth!

Driving in The Netherlands is a pleasure compared to Georgia where I've driven before. I noticed it even with scooters but with a car, it's even better. You are never confused with road markings and the road condition is perfect.

Anyway, after reaching Utrecht we successfully dispatched to Cologne where Gamescom was happening.

The scale of everything at the conference was shocking. Exactly how I imagined the biggest videogame conference in the world when I was a kid. Also, it's impossible to see and take part in everything in one day. No wonder the conference runs for 5 days. A queue to watch gameplay or for some activity can be 1–2 hours. Many people brought flexible chairs and it was smart.

My favorite place was the Indie hall. There were hundreds of indie games and you could speak directly to the developers. It's always a different level of connection compared to big corporation stands. They usually have PR staff in there.

Overall it was a great experience that immediately brought me back to childhood. I'll probably go next year as well but with a more structured plan of which booths and halls I want to visit. And I'll bring a chair.

The next day we also explored Düsseldorf where we stayed for the night. It was impossible to book a hotel in Cologne. I enjoyed the Little Tokyo district in Düsseldorf. Such a nice Japanese vibe there with many restaurants and manga stores.

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

We've been living in our apartment for a month and we connected all the utilities except one—the Internet. Our first provider pick was T‑Mobile. They should have connected our house somewhere in the middle of August. Turns out they have some issues with the optic cable owners and cannot use their cable in The Hague. And the landlord doesn't allow providing new cables to the building.

So after waiting for almost 4 weeks we had to pick another provider who already has optics here. We picked KPN but it also takes some time for them to provide the connection. Our appointment is on the 7th of September. The downside is that you can't change the appointment and we'll be in Berlin that day. Let's hope they will manage to leave the router and other stuff somewhere in the building.

All that time we were using an unlimited 4G connection but it's not perfect. Also, it's making the iPhone so hot you have to turn it off for some time to get it back to work.

💻 Cool purchase

One of my favorite purchases of recent weeks was an adjustable sitting/standing table. It's Flexispot E8. I always wanted one of those but with constant traveling it was impossible. Finally, we have a home for it!

Adjustments work perfectly and it's fully automated with programmable heights. The table is very sturdy and nice looking. If you're looking for a great table, absolutely recommend it.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

We started watching Little Fires Everywhere and, despite not very high reviews, the show is quite intriguing. I was also surprised to see AnnaSophia Robb in there. I liked her movies when she was younger and she is still a pretty good actress.

We're also playing Super Mario 3D World with my wife and it's super fun. I was never much into Mario games but this one is amazing. Perfect game to play with your partner after a long day!

That's it for today. This issue turned out a bit personal so I hope you enjoyed it.

—

Written in my mini office in The Hague

Dmitrii

Hey everyone!

I missed the Wednesday schedule so here is your Friday issue!

I noticed it's hard to keep up with any plans or schedules during the summer. Something always comes up.

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

I just came back from the morning run and I feel great. It's hard to force yourself to go out there but it feels fantastic when you do. Also, the runner's high is something I can relate to. After 20–30 minutes of running, I start feeling the elevation and dopamine injection. Absolutely recommend trying morning runs—could be your thing, too.

I mentioned my company's team retreat in the last issue. We went to the east part of the country, almost near the German border. The name of the region is Overijssel and the closest big city is Enschede.

The company rented a beautiful old house that was built in 1703. I was actually surprised at the condition of the house. I expected a run‑down building but it was well‑maintained. They had changed a lot but there were many little touches that remind you about the old times.

We had a pretty huge territory around the house. There was a restaurant in the same building but it worked once or twice. Most of the time, we had everything to ourselves.

On the weekdays we played a lot of board, VR, and field games. Now I know the games called Mölkky and Kubb. Both are a bit like Gorodki we have in post‑Soviet countries.

Also, we visited a city nearby to go to the Escape room. It was actually my first time. Somehow I missed the whole Escape room train.

I enjoyed it quite a lot. The whole room was interactive and many puzzles were intriguing. Also, the story was unexpectedly good. So if you ever will be in Enschede, I recommend going to their escape room.

We also played mini‑golf. It is a meditative activity and it's perfect to relax in the evening after a big party the day before. Which was our case 🍻

It was an amazing team retreat with some focused work and great leisure. I feel much more connected to my colleagues. It was needed after so many years of working and speaking with everyone only online. Besides, I enjoyed being outdoors. The slow rhythm of life helps you to reset your brain.

💻 Cool purchase

Right now, we buy a lot of stuff for the house and all kinds of electronics. So I'm adding a new section with cool purchases of the week. It'll stop at some point (otherwise we'll go bankrupt) but for now, I have some amazing stuff to share.

One of my favorite electronics so far was our TV — LG C1. There are different sizes but we picked 65" which is perfect for our distance from the couch.

This TV is an absolute beast if you're a gamer. It's designed for gaming, it even has picture settings for the different genres. It supports 4K resolution, HDR, 120Hz, 2.3 ms response time, VRR, and many more cool features. It's one of the best TVs for video games on the market right now and it's worth it. In combination with PS5, it's so good. The picture is always stunning.

💰 Finance and FIRE

I already mentioned in the previous issue my plan to reach FIRE by 40. One thing I want to add. I don't understand the FIRE concept or how it was originally presented. The idea was you stop working when you reach your goal number and it's strange. What would you do if you don't have some kind of work?

Some may say you spend all the time with your hobbies. But isn't a hobby becoming work at some point and almost everything is monetizable? Isn't money the perfect validation of your work?

My personal FIRE goal is that I don't have to be an employee of a company if I don't want to. I'll continue working on my projects, YouTube, and new things I'd love to try in life. And I'm hoping to make money on it. That's why I don't worry much about the numbers and arguments about 4% or 3% safety rates.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

—

Written on the balcony in The Hague,

Dmitrii

A bit unrelated to content but my PS5 started acting weird. I was never lucky with Sony gaming consoles. There was always something wrong with each console I owned. This PS5 is not an exception.

It is now randomly turning off from the rest mode. I'm thinking about sending it back for replacement. But want to try all possible fixes at first — changing cables, ports, settings.

Apart from that, we finished the last season of This is Us which in my personal opinion was boring as hell. The TV show is constantly trying to make you cry with cheesy scenes. Everything is repetitive and you have already seen it hundreds of times. It was a great series at first but they should have ended it a few seasons ago. Thankfully, it was a finale.

That's it for this week. Hopefully, you enjoyed the issue. As usual, you can ask me anything by hitting reply and sharing this newsletter on social media!

This weekend we're going to the biggest game conference in the world in Köln. I'll be back next week with the report! See ya!

—

Written on the train from Utrecht to Köln

Dmitrii

Tomorrow I’ll dispatch to my first team retreat in The Netherlands so I’m writing this on Tuesday.

How is your week going? Feel free to answer me back and let me know how you are handling this summer heat if you have one.

Also, there was something wrong with my “From” email domain and confirmation emails didn’t work. So if you tried to subscribe to the newsletter, please try again!

🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands

In the middle of the year, I already realized that I will blow away my annual goal. It was to reach $1k revenue with my project Taco Digest. To be honest, so many things changed since January 1st, 2022, so I’m not surprised or disappointed at all.

I was a big fan of new year's resolutions but I'm at an unpredictable and experimental stage so I only set one goal for the 2022:

💰Make some money on my projects 💰

My soft goal is $1k per month and perfect goal is $2k. Any income counts except my job/freelance or investments

— Dima Pashutskii (@guar47) January 3, 2022

But I want to reach some accomplishment this year, so I picked a goal I’ve never done before—run a half‑marathon. It’ll take place in Amsterdam on October 16, so I have plenty of time to prepare.

I started by downloading Strava’s half‑marathon preparation calendar and following it. First step is building endurance, so I’m focusing on long runs. Last week I managed to run for an hour, which is a good achievement already. I’ll keep you updated. I also want to read more about food and water consumption during runs.

One amazing thing about running in the Netherlands (true not only for running, but more noticeable): when you meet someone’s eyes they immediately smile or nod to acknowledge you. I love this—it gives a nice boost of confidence and mood. Kudos if you smile at strangers. If you don't, just try it.

A shocking revelation from last week was the curtains industry. We have quite high windows in our rental (~3.50m / ~11ft), so most curtains should be custom. We asked the company that’s been doing curtains in the building how much it would cost. The answer: €1200! For curtains! 🤯

After some consideration, we ran to IKEA and bought default curtains for €9.99 each and hung them ourselves. Yes, we now have ~30cm (12in) off the floor to the curtain. But we saved a buttload of money, and it does the job for movie/gaming sessions—our TV stand is right near the window.

As I mentioned, my wife and I are going to our company retreat for five days and I’m looking forward to it. We’ve worked with the company for almost 5 years already but were always remote. There are even some people we’ve never met, so it should be fun. The company rented a house somewhere in the west of the country.

👷 YouTube and my projects

I’m ashamed to say that I still haven't started with either of those. I am determined to start today since I took the day off. A lot is going on: buying and assembling furniture, planning trips for the summer, and simply dealing with immigration/documents. Sometimes I find myself deep into all that and wake up in the evening having done nothing for my projects.

Huge thanks to people who continue watching my videos and leave nice, encouraging comments. It’s always the best motivation.

💰 Finance and FIRE

As I mentioned in the last issue, I intend to be more transparent about my finances and FIRE goals here. Let’s start with FIRE.

For those unfamiliar: FIRE means Financial Independence, Retire Early.

Several studies show that if you have 25× your annual spending invested, you can live off it forever (the 4% rule). There are many caveats, but let’s keep it simple for now: ~4% of your net worth is a safe withdrawal rate per year.

We arrived in the Netherlands to work. We’re also planning to get a local passport here after 5 years of living in the country. These 5 years we’ll be employed here, accumulating our net worth.

Plans after 5–6 years are still unclear, but the goal is to reach FIRE in this timeframe. After that, we want to either get back to traveling or move to another country—worse for work opportunities but cheaper. Portugal is a good option for us so far, but let’s see how things change.

As mentioned, we’re currently at ~30% of our FIRE number (with a 4% safe withdrawal per year). So we should contribute around 10% per year + investment returns to stay on track. It’s realistic for us, but depends on many factors—for example, kids, which we don’t have yet. That’s a topic for another discussion.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

Unfortunately, my PS5 keeps turning off by itself, so I’ll send it for repair. Hence, I’ll take a break from Horizon Forbidden West or any PS5 games. It’s a shame, especially considering that I just bought Cyberpunk 2077.

At the same time, we’re considering buying a second console (we’re a family of gamers). Maybe another PS5 or an Xbox Series X—we’re still thinking.

I'm watching a lot about life in Europe on YouTube and discovered the channel hello erika. It's a lifestyle channel about Europe and a bit of travel; I enjoy her style and sense of humor. Check her out if you’re looking for light, funny videos.

We stopped using our pirate service (useful while traveling in places with terrible streaming), so now we have to stick with traditional streaming. We started with a free Amazon Prime month and picked up the last season of This Is Us. I loved this show at the beginning but, to be honest, it’s getting repetitive and a bit boring.

That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed my mumbling. As usual, hit reply with anything, and have a nice week!

—

Written on the balcony in The Hague,

Dmitrii

I sent my first newsletter six months ago but never sent any follow-ups. I’ve had quite a lot of changes in my life since then. But I want to get back to writing this newsletter in a different format. I want to make it more personal and focus on the stuff I enjoy doing. Big shout‑out to Ali Abdaal’s video for poking me to get back to writing it again.

But let’s start with what happened over the last six months.

🇳🇱 Immigration to the Netherlands

The most significant change in my life was that I moved to The Netherlands and said goodbye to my nomadic life. Becoming a digital nomad was one of the best decisions of my life, but I don't think it's something you want to pursue forever. By the end of our 4th year as nomads, both my wife and I noticed that we were getting tired of living out of suitcases. We wanted a home base and more comfort. Even the most expensive Airbnb will never replace a home.

Our initial plan was to move to Canada. We went through a lot of procedures to get in line. Unfortunately, during COVID‑19, Canada stopped issuing immigration invitations, and we couldn't get in. The plan was to keep traveling and wait until things resumed, but then Russia invaded Ukraine.

Despite not living in Russia for almost four years, we still have Russian passports. We never planned to return, but the war became the last straw. We realized we needed to move fast and get new documents. I won't go too deep into politics or world news. Let’s just say we no longer see ourselves as part of that country. And we still hope every day for our friends in Ukraine to be safe 🇺🇦❤️

We both had been working for a Dutch company for a while. They offered us an option to move to The Netherlands, and after some thinking, we decided it was a good option. We had considered The Netherlands before, but then COVID‑19 started and it was almost impossible to get in, so we dropped the idea.

Fast forward to today: we’re in The Hague, and we’re extremely happy with the choice. The Netherlands is excellent—at least it has been for the last month we’ve been here.

This month was a bit crazy because moving to a new country means doing many things at once: new documents, finding a place to live, buying furniture, and arranging everything inside the apartment. Plus, we had to work as well. That consumed all our time.

Things are slowing down now, so I want to get back to my projects and pick up writing again. One of the topics of this newsletter will be living in The Netherlands as an expat. I also hope to travel around Europe more (first time with unlimited EU travel!) and share the trips with you.

📺 YouTube

Because of the reasons above, I abandoned all my projects. I haven't uploaded new videos since May 27th, and I almost didn't ship anything to my main project Taco Digest.

Honestly, I’m testing what I want to work on next. I’m 100% sure I want to do YouTube, and I’ll start editing a new video today. I have two already shot back in Georgia. I still have a few ideas for videos about Georgia. Then I’ll switch to making videos about The Netherlands and traveling Europe. I also enjoy discussing finances, so I’ll experiment there too.

The first minor goal is to reach monetization. I’m currently at 1,455 subscribers, which is nice, but watch hours are still around ~3,200 and I need 4,000. By my calculations, I should get there in 2–3 months.

Another topic I want to cover in this newsletter is growth on YouTube. I’ll share my stats, what’s happening with the channel, and the challenges I’m facing.

👷 Taco Digest and other projects

I’ll continue working on Taco Digest for some time. I have a list of what I want to ship to mark the project as version 2 and relaunch it. One big thing I want to try is replacing free tiers with a free trial. My main goal with Taco is to get MRR growing, so I want to experiment with monetization.

Life is more stable now. I switched to working full‑time (well, almost—four days a week) from freelancing. I’m on speed with my financial goals. Hence, I want to experiment more.

For example, I have a very ambitious idea for a project, but it won’t make money soon. It’s something I’ve wanted to work on for a long time. It’s pretty big and a bit silly, but I’m quite interested in it. It’s related to video games. I also have a few ideas that are more profit‑focused, so let’s hope I’ll start working on them this year.

I’ll share in this newsletter what’s going on with these projects from my perspective as an entrepreneur. The goal isn’t to advertise, but to tell the story of growing them.

💰 Finance and FIRE

Another area I love is finance. I got into finance, investing, and FIRE a few years ago, and I enjoy the topic. Seeing your net worth grow—and moving toward financial freedom—is cathartic. Recently, the market wasn’t as exciting as last year, but that’s not a big deal for a long‑term investor.

We’ve reached 30% of our FIRE goal, and I’ll discuss it more in future issues. The plan is to reach financial independence before 40, which means in 5–6 years, and we’re on track.

I’m not an expert by any means, so I’ll share my perspective on finance and reaching FIRE as an ordinary person here.

🎁 Content I’m consuming

Another part of many newsletters I always liked is content recommendations. I want to add something similar here. Likely YouTube channels, articles, books, movies, TV shows, and video games.

By the way, I finally managed to buy a PlayStation 5, which is usually sold out everywhere. More gaming is coming! I already started Horizon Forbidden West, and the game looks terrific.

Last week, I returned to the mainstream on YouTube and enjoyed a lot of MrBeast videos—perfect for summer binge‑watching after assembling another IKEA piece.

I’m also rewatching Entourage. Still fun, but more sexist than I remember it being 7–8 years ago.

I didn’t read much, and I’m still in the middle of Work Rules!. To be honest, the book isn’t as good as I hoped, but not bad enough to drop—so I’m still going.

In the cinema world, I enjoyed Licorice Pizza from Paul Thomas Anderson—exactly the level of weird, fun, and meaning that I love. Also, the Pixar animation Lightyear. Not as great as the Toy Story series, but not as bad as the IMDb score suggests.

All right, this newsletter is already long—huge thanks if you made it to the end. I appreciate it. 🙏

Please let me know what you think about the format or ask any questions by hitting reply.

I plan to send it every Wednesday. Stay tuned for the next one, and I’d appreciate it if you shared it with friends!

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Instagram for daily updates.

Written on the balcony in The Hague,

Dmitrii

Georgia has an excellent opportunity for foreigners to get a driving license. The process is straightforward compared to many other countries. You will get a driving license for 15 years. Besides, you can request an international driving permit for 3 years. It follows Vienna’s and Geneva’s conventions.

There are no requirements for getting through driving school in Georgia. If you already know how to drive you can pass the exam and get a license. I still recommend going through the preparation even for experienced drivers.

🖥 Theory test

The first element of the exam is a theory test. It contains 30 questions and you can make 3 mistakes. Here is a website where you can self-prepare for the exam. There are 1000+ different cards separated into 32 categories. Plenty of languages are available, including English. Most of the questions have translations except for a few in the last sections. I used Google Translate to prepare for them.

On the exam, you will use a computer. You have 30 minutes which is more than enough. Besides, I took a few lessons with a theory instructor via Zoom to clarify complicated questions. I can’t say it was helpful but if you have issues you cannot find answers to, I would recommend it.

It took me 2-3 months to prepare for the exam. I was taking it slowly but it could be done in a week. On the last two days before the exam I spend around 3 hours cramming through as many test exams as possible. All the failed cards I wrote down and review later. It helped a lot.

The registration system for the exam is a bit bothersome. You have to sign up beforehand. In many big cities, all the exam slots are occupied within minutes after they are published. I had to move to Batumi just to be able to sign up for the exam and even there I only managed to register one month later. The new dates are added on the website one time in two weeks on Sunday at 9 am.

The cost of the exam is 57 Lari (~ €19/$21). To pay for the exam you have to have a Georgian bank card. At least, I couldn’t pay with my home country's credit card. You also need to have a local phone number to get a text message with your registration number. You can ask your local friend to help with those.

Unfortunately, if you fail the exam you have to go through the whole process again. It could take a lot of time so I would recommend succeeding the first time.

To sign up you have to enter your passport/ID number, pick the time and pay for the exam. Here are the links where you can do this:

• TBC Bank
• Bank of Georgia
• Liberty bank: Theory exam booking, City practice exam booking

On the day of the exam you have to bring the next documents with you:

• Medical certificate - you can get it in any hospital around Georgia. They check height, weight, and vision. It costs around 20 Lari (~ €7/$7).
• Your passport/ID. You need a Georgian translation of your ID but they can translate it inside the Police department for 6 Lari (~ €2/$2). It’s easier to do it there.
• A text message with your exam number.
• Your address. It could be anything including Airbnb

At the exam time, you’ll be let into the room with 6 computers with sensor screens. There will be instructions on how to proceed with the exam. During the exam, you can “skip to the end” any question if you feel that they are taking too much time. You also will see if you answered right or wrong right on the screen immediately after the answer. You cannot bring your phone inside the room.

After finishing the test you can leave. You don’t need any confirmation. Your results will be saved on their side.

🚘 Practice test

The second part of getting your Georgian driving license is the driving test. You will have to pass the “field test” by correctly succeeding in six elements and tasks:

• parallel parking
• uphill stop on the handbrake and start a movement from that position
• reverse parking inside the garage
• 8 track
• change of direction (turn around)
• zigzag driving

You can pass the exam on the automatic or manual transmission. But be aware that if you pass the exam on automatic it will be marked inside your license. With that license, you won’t be able to drive manual transmission cars. For example, if you’re planning to drive in Europe it will be hard to find a car for rent. Most of the cars in Europe have a manual transmission.

I strongly recommend taking classes from local drivers or driving school. Even if you know how to drive the car they will give you some hints on passing the exam exercises. Parallel parking is quite easy if you know the trick. You have to change the wheel direction once you see the third column in your back mirror. Other hints like this will be very helpful.

Local driving instructors are usually cost 25 Lari (~ €8/$9) for the lesson. The driving school costs around 40 Lari (~ €14/$15) for the lesson. I took 4 lessons and it was enough for me to pass the exam. I’ve never driven a car before.

Once you are ready for the exam you should come to the Police department. It's usually the same where you passed the theory test. I advise you to come early, around 8 am. There are two lists near the practice field - one for manual and one for automatic transmission. You can fill it with your name near the closest available place in line. When I arrived at 8 am I managed to sign up to be third one day and thirteen the second day. If you arrive at 9 am or later you will be at 25th or lower place so you have to wait quite a while. The exam starts at 9.30 am.

When your place in line has come you should go inside the car. The police officer will explain to you a few basics about the exam and turn on the record with instructions. After that, the exam starts. The police officer is forbidden to talk to you during the exam. So if you have any questions you should ask them in the beginning.

There are many sensors around the field and inside the car. The program on the computer decides whether you made mistake or not. The human factor is completely excluded. At the start of the exam, you’ll be given 100 points and they will be reduced for the mistakes. To pass the exam you have to stay above 61 points. Once this mark is crossed the exam will be over. In my experience, 1-3 mistakes are enough to fail, depending on how crucial they are. The cars on the test are the “Skoda Fabia” model.

You have one free attempt per week to pass the exam for manual transmission. But for 31 Lari (~ €11/$12) you can try every day. For automatic transmission, there are no free attempts. Each one costs 40 Lari (~ €14/$15). After you successfully passed the exam you can get the driving license on the same day for 55 Lari (~ €19/$21) or wait for 3 days and get them for free. You can also request an International driving permit for 110 Lari (~ €38/$41) on the same day. It could change but I got both AM and B category in my license. AM is required for driving scooters/mopeds.

Updated 13.08.2024: Georgia introduced the city exams since 25.04.2022.

Currently, you must also pass a practical second exam - city driving exam.

The number of pre-determined exam routes varies by city. In Rustavi, a city near Tbilisi, there are typically 7-8 possible routes, while smaller cities usually have only 2-4.

During the exam, you will drive around the city for approximately 40 minutes, demonstrating that you are ready to be an active participant in road traffic. The qualification criteria are strict, and even minor mistakes can result in the exam being stopped.

If you live in Georgia and can wait, you can register for an appointment for 90 Lari (~ €31/$34), which is scheduled for 3-4 weeks after you successfully pass the first practical test.

For a faster process, you can pay 252 Lari (~ €86/$94) to enter the live queue on the same day. However, due to high demand, you might still need to wait a couple of days.

😌 Getting help

While it is possible to pass the driving license process on your own, it can be quite challenging if you do not speak Georgian or Russian. Even native Georgians often spend several months trying to obtain their license and may face multiple failures.

Considering the opportunity costs of staying in Georgia longer—such as rearranging flights, extending accommodations, paying for additional classes and exam fees—and the lack of a guaranteed pass due to unfamiliarity with crucial details and requirements, it is a logical and rational decision to seek professional support. Doing so can ultimately save you time, stress, and money.

There is an agency dedicated to helping foreigners in Georgia obtain their licenses in the fastest legal way possible. The founder, having obtained both a motorcycle and car license in Georgia as a foreigner, understands all the details and legal nuances necessary to expedite the process, saving you time and money on potential exam retakes.

The Urgent Driving License in Georgia Service provides comprehensive support from start to finish, allowing you to focus solely on studying and practicing for the exams and attending your appointments. Their professional team of translators and local agents ensures you have all the information needed to pass the exams quickly, avoid mistakes, work with English-speaking instructors, and access the best theory preparation materials.

They will accompany you to all appointments and handle all aspects of the process that require a Georgian phone number and bank account.

By using their service and registering with the special discount code “SLOWANDSTEADY2024” from my blog, you will receive a bonus: free registration for the theory and first practical exam.

You can register here: Urgent Driving License Registration

Please note: If you have been an EU resident for more than six months, it is unlikely that you can use this license in the EU, except in certain countries with special regulations, such as Ireland, where residents may later exchange it for a local one. It is also not valid in your country of residence.

Always check the validity and exchange options before planning your trip.

You can also reach out to them on Instagram but don't forget to mention the discount code to get free stuff.

💯 Conclusion

To sum up, you can relatively easily, cheap and fast get a new driving license. The whole process can take as small as a few weeks and costs around $100 including all the fees and paid lessons.

Make sure you understand the rules of exchanging a Georgian driving license in another country in case you’re planning to move somewhere else. In general, most countries allow you to drive for 6 months with foreign driving license. Then you have to exchange it for the local one. But this is a perfect solution for digital nomads without a license.

Also, I tell you to drive carefully and take a few lessons in the city before driving on your own.

Hey everyone! 👋

Welcome to my very first newsletter issue.

Thank you for subscribing. In these newsletters I’ll share my journey as an indie hacker and YouTuber. I’ll post about my progress and results of different experiments.

If you have any questions you can always hit reply and I’ll answer you! Since it's my first issue, I’m open for any feedback or suggestion you can give me 🙂

I’m planning to send this newsletter every 2 weeks but don’t beat me up if I fail from time to time 😅

Approach

This year is going to be a year of building for me.

I’m working as a part-time software engineer, but my last day is on 31st of March. After that I’m planning to double down on my projects and YouTube.

About the process, I want to try approach “1 week marketing - 1 week development”. It was inspired by this tweet:

Until now I've been very adhoc with how I balance code and marketing. From today I'm going to cycle; one week of marketing <-> one week of code. I think this will allow me more time to write content, and at the same time force me to really think about what features are priority.

— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) May 26, 2020

It feels like a sane approach. It allows you to start prioritizing and don’t forget about marketing as we programmers tend to do often. In general, I like the separation of concerns pattern, so why don’t use it for entrepreneurship?

The idea is to make even weeks (#2, #4) focusing on marketing and odd weeks (#1, #3) focusing on building.

Goals

At the beginning of the year, as many others, I set an annual resolution for 2022. For this year, I set one and only goal — to earn money on my projects. Here is the tweet and small thread on how I’m planning to do this:

I was a big fan of new year's resolutions but I'm at an unpredictable and experimental stage so I only set one goal for the 2022:

💰Make some money on my projects 💰

My soft goal is $1k per month and perfect goal is $2k. Any income counts except my job/freelance or investments

— Dima Pashutskii (@guar47) January 3, 2022

January

The start of the year was a bit chaotic. I had vacation on the first week of the month. Afterwards, I was trying to get back to my routine.

Most of the attempts failed because my wife and I had to prepare to moving to the next city. Hence, we had a lot of packing and goodbye parties in Tbilisi 🍻

On 1st of February we moved to Batumi — nice coastal town on the Black Sea located in the western part of Georgia.

The biggest highlights of the January:

• ⭐️ Launched and set up this newsletter (it took me one and a half months to send my first issue)
• ⭐️ Sold two lifetime deals for Taco Digest making $260 — our first money above a hundred dollars on the project
• ⭐️ Sent first product update and message that we’re disabling lifetime deals for Taco Digest. We decided to focus on subscription model because it’s more sustainable
• ⭐️ Published an extensive annual review of 2021 as a blog post and a Twitter thread. The blog post got 45 page views and the Twitter thread got 1,006 impressions + 85 engagements
• ⭐️ Participated in the first YouTube accountability group call

February — Week #6 and Week #7

In February things started getting much better for my routine and schedule. I managed to get back to waking up at 8am making 4–5 hours for my projects before starting working around noon.

Taco Digest

Development

Taco Digest is the main priority project right now. On the week #6 I focused on the development and fixed most of the bugs we had since MVP launch.

I also switched from Sentry to Honeybadger for error tracking.

First, it’s built by indie makers. Second, Sentry disabled Slack integration for free accounts. I still want to remain as less cost as possible until we start making money. So far I’m enjoying the service.

Marketing

On the marketing week (current one) I focused on learning as much as possible about SEO and apply it to our landing.

Besides, I started creating feature‑focused extra pages on the landing for rankings.

I also realized that I can create even more pages focusing on specific data sources for each feature. For example, create a separate page “get /r/wallstreetbets email digest”. And make more of them for all the popular Subreddits. Same with popular blogs but for RSS etc.

We hit our 90th sign up but still lacking new paid subscribers. So, I’m thinking about adding some future data sources as paid only to increase attraction of the paid plan.

I also created a subreddit for Taco Digest. I hope for backlinks and ranking in the future. But, I haven’t started posting anything there yet.

So far referrals for the last 30 days on the landing look interesting. I didn’t intentionally post anything on Indie Hackers about Taco Digest but it goes first:

YouTube

I already posted two videos in February. That's a win 🥳 Hopefully I can sustain this “1 week — 1 video” schedule.

I posted one video on the Russian channel and one on the English channel. Both about my top 10 countries to visit as digital nomad.

Here is the video in English:

Another cool thing that I hit 4000 hours on my Russian channel. I have 930 subscribers which means I’m going to hit monetization this month 💰

I understand it won’t give me much money at the beginning so I’ll try to experiment.

The first small experiment is to create Patreon accounts. I made it with one tier that allows you to get access to the videos 2 days early and support my channel in general: Dmitrii Pashutskii is creating YouTube videos | Patreon.

So far — you can guess it — it’s crickets. Let’s see if something will change when I mention it in the next video.

In addition, I made an ad for Taco Digest in the latest video; you can watch it here. I only published the video today so it’s hard to say if I get any leads from it.

That’s it for my first newsletter issue. I hope to hear from you and happy to answer any questions!

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter for daily updates.

Until the next time,

Dmitrii

⏰ Time

You can immediately see the effect of the unproductive month on the time tracking graphic. I had a few productive days and that is it.

📺 YouTube

I love that even when I publish zero videos in a specific month, YouTube continues to grow. I think it’s one of my favourite things about evergreen content (YouTube, blog posts) compared to social media where if you don’t post for a month it would be a disaster.

As usual, the Russian YouTube channel is thriving and when I’m writing this post I already achieved 4000 hours for monetization. All I need is 1000 subscribers now which probably happen in February.

🇬🇧 English Channel (totals on 10.02.2022):

• ⭐️ +67 new subscribers (-14% to December) - total 812 🔴⬇️
• ⭐️ +4k views (+1% to December) - total 91.7k 🔵🆗
• ⭐️ +250.4 hours watch time (+4% growth to December) - total 5.5k 🔵🆗
• ⭐️ 6.1% average Impression click through rate (-0.2 to December) 🔵🆗
• ⭐️ 36.3% average percentage viewed (+0.6 to December) 🔵🆗

Russian Channel (totals on 10.02.2022):

• ⭐️ +179 new subscribers (+39% to December) - total 919 ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ +7.6k view (-3% to December) - total 44.4k 🔵🆗
• ⭐️ +698.5 hours watch time (+19% to December) - 4.1k ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ 7.3% average Impression click through rate (+0.9 to December) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ 46.8% average percentage viewed (+11.5 to December) ✅⬆️⬆️

👨‍💻 Side projects

🌮 Taco digest

In January we didn’t do much for Taco. Mostly focusing on fixing all the bugs after launch and trying to spread the word about the project.

In January, we also sold two LifeTimeDeals for Taco and we removed this type of payment from the project. Now we’ll only focus on subscriptions.

Writing

Telegram channel

I published 3 posts on my channel. I like that Telegram started growing on its own. There was a time when the growth was stagnant. People are mostly coming from a YouTube channel and when my post got shared on the bigger channels.

In January, I got from 272 followers to 301, adding +29 new followers.

💸 Income

I decided to add a new “Income” section to my monthly report. I probably won’t have much of an income for a while but it’s good to start reminding myself of my annual goal.

The only income I have for now is from Taco Digest and since we sold 2 LifeTimeDeals it added to January.

When we sold them I discovered how horrible PayPal fees are so I disabled the ability to pay through PayPal for Taco Digest.

Here is a screenshot from my Paddle account with numbers:

💰 Money and FIRE

The market is crushing a little hence not much growth this month. I continue to stick to the plan: dollar-cost average investing and reducing my cash allocation. Also, slowly selling my old Russian index funds and only focusing on Vanguard.

I finally reached less than 5% in crypto so I’m thinking of buying more to restock it back to 5%.

🔥 FIRE stats:

• ⭐️ 20.53% towards my FIRE goal
• ⭐️ My Net Worth grew +4.82% in January.
• ⭐️ My current Net worth allocations: 52.23% invested + 48.95% in cash.

📈 Assets allocation:

• ⭐️ 50.38% VTI Total US Stock index fund
• ⭐️ 20.53% S&P500 index fund
• ⭐️ 11.96% VXUS Total International Stock index fund (no US)
• ⭐️ 8.64% NASDAQ index fund
• ⭐️ 5.25% Other stocks and ETFs
• ⭐️ 3.23% Crypto

🎮 Reading and Entertainment

I finished Dune by Frank Herbert. It’s a great book overall but I feel like I need a break before starting the second and third book. So I started reading non-fiction again.

In January I started reading Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl. I’ve been following him on Twitter for a while and he is a great guy who posts a lot of great content for entrepreneurs.

In January, I was playing Persona 5 Royal. But when I’m writing this I already completed it. I played 151 hours making it the longest game I’ve ever played in my life 😅 The game is worth it though. I enjoyed the time in this weird universe.

--

That’s it for January. As you can see below, I added a newsletter to my blog. If you want more content about the process of being a YouTuber and entrepreneur, feel free to subscribe. I still haven’t sent the first newsletter but it’ll happen soon.

This year was a rollercoaster for me. I started with many plans and ambitions but burned out at the beginning of the year. I only started recovery somewhere in September. The end of the year was super productive and I made a lot of progress on my projects.

I was trying to figure out the reasons behind my decline at the beginning of 2021. It was probably the aftershock of the difficult previous year. In 2020, I had depression and mental issues because of what was happening in the world and from travel fatigue. We also couldn’t leave Bali which we get tired of after 1.5 years in there.

So most of the first half of 2021 I was recovering from that stuff. In addition, I quit my job in 2020 and I was a bit lost in indie hacking after a couple of unsuccessful launches.

In the middle of 2021 a few good things happened which helped me to recover faster and get back on track:

• I moved to Georgia and rent a good long-term apartment. It allowed me to recover and relax from travel
• I started working part-time again. It improved the mood from unsuccessful indie hacking experience
• I started waking up early and to exercise more. I reconsidered my information consumption and productivity in general
• I started focusing more and spreading myself less

All that lead to a healthy lifestyle at the end of the year. I finally came back to making regular YouTube videos and launched my first paid product.

The best representation of my year is in GitHub commits:

✅ 2021 Goals

This year I started with annual resolutions on Twitter. Let’s see how I progressed on them:

My goals for 2021 🎉 I want to be focused this year.

📺 Content creation: YouTube and blogging, want to finally dig into that
🇨🇦 Immigration to Canada: start the process and move to Vancouver
🚢 Ship at least 5 more side projects and start getting income. Or find the freelance

— Dima Pashutskii 🌮📺 (@guar47) January 13, 2021

Content creation ✅

I can say this one is a success. I started making YouTube videos again for two channels on a regular basis. I'm happy about my comeback on YouTube and looking forward make more content this year.

I can't say the same about writing though. I didn't write much in general. But at the end of the year, I started writing monthly retrospectives. It's nice to see progress within a period. Help you to understand progress better.

Definitely planning to write more in 2022.

Immigration to Canada 🚫

Not a successful one but we did everything we could from our side. We prepared all the documents, valuated diplomas, passed the IELTS exam and signed for the program. We technically passed all the requirements for immigration but COVID made it impossible to move. Canada stopped all the invitation process on the 1st of January 2021 and it’s still on hold.

A lot of things changed since then. We already have doubts about whether we even need to move to Canada. There are other better opportunities like Portugal. We still didn’t cancel this but it's not as clear as a year ago.

Shipping side projects ✅🚫

I had some issues with building side projects at the beginning of the year. In total, I shipped only two products (NextPlace and Taco Digest) instead of five.

I still consider this goal a success, especially the last launch. Taco Digest was my first paid product and I even got one paying customer. The product is interesting to work on and I’m very excited to grow it in 2022.

I failed to ship five projects but I’m happy with the results anyway. I like that I came back to productive shipping at the end of the year and got my wife on board as well.

⏰ Time

I track my time making it easier to analyze the progress later.

This year I tracked 566 hours and 18 minutes. It’s around 47 hours per month or 12 hours per week. Not a big amount but let’s see how I spend it:

I’m happy with the time I spent on YouTube videos.

I spent too many hours making Taco Digest without launching it. I should have made an early launch and then continue development.

Nextplace project was also a mistake because I didn’t even launch it. It took so much time because I was using Django and Python which I didn’t have experience with. Afterwards, I decided to re-write it to Next.js which also wasn’t a necessary step. The product is still up there but I’m not sure what to do with it.

Almost all hours of Learning I spend on IELTS exam preparations. It was necessary because we need it for our Canadian immigration. If we decide not to go to Canada it wasn’t the best way to spend time though.

All the other projects were insignificant so I won’t review them.

📺 YouTube

I’m quite happy with my progress on YouTube. I love making videos and it pays off with the increasing audience and improved quality.

In 2021, in addition to my English-speaking channel, I created one in Russian. I am making videos on the same topics but creating two versions of them in each language. I made 13 videos for my Russian channel and 15 for my English one. Let’s dive into numbers.

Russian channel

• +687 subscribers (687 total)
• +34600 views
• +3200 hours watched

Here is a screenshot from the analytics page:

The consistency pays off and videos are becoming more popular with time. I’m close to the monetization milestone on this channel. The best approach here is to publish videos more often. The amount and the frequency of the content are still crucial parts of success on YouTube.

🇬🇧 English channel

• +370 subscribers (712 total)
• +28800 views
• +1700 watched hours

Analytics page screenshot:

The English Channel has more slow but consistent growth. I already had 62 videos on this channel so they compound with time. Compared to the Russian channel where views are jumping in peaks. This growth could be bigger considering the number of videos I have on the channel. But if we bear in mind that I pivot the channel it's fair that growth is slow. It was a travel vlog before and now it's informational digital nomad content.

Fun fact that on the English channel only 5 of my top 10 viewed videos were posted in 2021:

In general, making videos in Russian is easier and a bit more rewarding because it's rising faster. But I still love making videos in English. I use English Internet and participate only in English-speaking communities.

Once I hit monetization on both channels I’ll think if I should focus on one of the channels or continue to invest in both. I expect that I reach monetization on both channels in February - April.

I don't have plans on changing much in my tactics for YouTube. I want to make each video as good as I can and stick to the regular posting. I want to take more part in creators' communities to get feedback and find collaborations. I also want to work on different monetization tactics for the channel like creating a course, Patreon, e-book, affiliate etc.

🛠 Side projects

This year I managed to ship only two products despite aiming for five.

🗺 Nextplace

The first product in 2021 was NextPlace - website with information about digital nomad visas. This was a learning project which was a bad idea if I wanted to make a business of it.

I wrote it in a completely new tech stack for me (Python and Django). Then I realized that I won’t be able to support it on these technologies and rewrote it again in Next.js.

Learning Django and making a project with it, took a lot of time. When I completed it, I lost track of why I was building this product in the first place. There are similar websites that show exactly the same information. Right now NextPlace is sitting there and I have no idea what to do with it 🙂 I didn’t share or launch it anywhere. I'll think later about its future.

🌮 Taco Digest

The second project was way more interesting - Taco Digest. It's a personal newsletter digest. You can customize your own newsletter from different sources across the web.

I worked on it from May and only launched it in December. 8 months is way too long to work on MVP. I should have launched it after 2 months and spent the next 6-month looking for customers. It was a good lesson so from now on I'll be launching early.

I love the product and even my wife joined along the way to help with the design and development. It’s my first paid product and we even managed to land the first customer. It isn’t much but it was an important milestone. So far we only launched on PH and Twitter. We have 63 sign-ups and some good feedback.

In 2022, I’m planning to focus on marketing and finding new customers for Taco. But also building new features that are requested more often.

The marketing part will involve a lot of learning and experimenting. I have very small knowledge in that area. Early on, I want to focus on SEO since it takes a long time to take off and it’s one thing I know at least a little about.

And I need to start with the beginning of the customer funnel - leads (awareness). On the day of launch, we have many visitors but it felt down afterwards.

Here is SimpleAnalitycs of the landing page:

✍️ Writing and Social media

👨‍💻 Blog

As I mentioned in the first part I wasn’t writing much this year except my monthly retrospectives. Since September I published three of them in total on this blog. They help me reflect on the past month so I’ll continue writing them in 2022. I decided to skip December but write this 2021 review instead.

✈️ Telegram channel

Another place where I write is my telegram channel in Russian. I use it as secondary social media for my Russian YouTube channel. It gives me extra views when the new video comes out. You can say I have my “true fans” there who is always great to interact with 🙂 I would love to have a similar place for my English-speaking channel but still haven't found it.

I wasn’t posting much at the beginning of the year but started being more consistent by the end of the year. Instagram banned my account and I've decided to stop using this terrible social media 😂

My followers dropped from 239 since the beginning of the year to the lowest amount of 222 in the middle of the year. But they grew to 285 at the end when I started posting consistently. Also, I added a telegram link to my YouTube page so I guess many people came from it.

🧳 Slowandsteady

This year I also launched my travel/digital nomad blog but I didn't write anything there. I had a couple of old travel articles so I updated and posted them on this blog.

I want to start writing for the blog this year. I’ll start with converting my YouTube videos to blog posts to improve SEO and discoverability for the channel.

💰 Money

Even with me only working 5 months this year the money situation is only improving. My wife was still working the whole year and we made good investments, so our net worth is growing.

🤑 Spending

We track our expenses for the last 5 years and it helps a lot with planning and budgeting.

Most of this year we spend in Tbilisi, Georgia renting a long-term apartment. It's much cheaper than our usual Airbnb places. At the same time, we spent too much money on electronics and gifts this year. Not taking into account $8600 on "shopping" I can say it was a good year. One of the cheapest for a long time.

Here is a Google spreadsheet of our expenses:

🔥 FIRE and Investments

We were investing the whole year and it started to pay off growing our net worth even further.

Money stats:

• We grew our Net Worth 77% in 2021 this year which is incredible
• We are currently at 19.36% toward our FIRE goal
• Current Net worth allocations: 48.99% invested + 52.63% in cash.

Investment allocations:

• 44.52% VTI Total US Stock index fund - main investment fund we’re buying
• 24.49% S&P500 ETF - selling but still have quite a lot
• 10.78% NASDAQ ETF - also selling
• 9.71% VXUS Total International Stock index fund (no US) - diversification to VTI fund, buying
• 6.06% Other stocks and ETFs - small percentage of different stuff which is currentely down. I’ll sell them in a few years.
• 4.52% Cryptocurrency (BTC, ETH, ADA, XLM) - I didn’t buy anything in crypto for a while. I’ll start when it falls down to less than 4%.

Our main strategy is 80% VTI + 20% VXUS and it stays the same for upcoming years.

🧳 Travel

The last section is new because I don't post about this in my monthly retrospectives. It is more interesting to post about travel on the scale of the year.

This year we didn’t travel much though because we decided to take a break and settle down in Georgia for 6 months. It was a great time to recover and we are very excited to get back on the road in 2022.

In 2021, we travelled to 4 countries and 7 cities. Countries: 🇹🇷 Turkey, Russia, 🇺🇦 Ukraine and 🇬🇪 Georgia. Cities: 🇹🇷 Antalya, 🇹🇷 Istanbul, Saint Petersburg, 🇺🇦Kyiv, 🇬🇪 Tbilisi, 🇬🇪 Stepantsminda, 🇬🇪 Batumi

Surprisingly, it was the most social year for us and we met so many great people in Tbilisi. We made more friends during the last 6 months than in the previous 3 years of travel combined. It’s amazing and I’m going to miss everyone when we leave.

That’s it for 2021!

I’m planning so many interesting things for 2022 and I’m very excited to start ✨ This year I decided to post a simple annual resolution to channel my focus. Here is the resolution tweet:

I was a big fan of new year's resolutions but I'm at an unpredictable and experimental stage so I only set one goal for the 2022:

💰Make some money on my projects 💰

My soft goal is $1k per month and perfect goal is $2k. Any income counts except my job/freelance or investments

— Dima Pashutskii 🇬🇪 (@guar47) January 3, 2022

⏰ Time

I spent 94 hours working on my job and 82 hours working on my side projects. It's making it a total of 176 productive hours in November. I am an ardent opponent of overworking so it's my limit. I would have never worked more than 180 hours per month and even this amount sounds a bit too much. But I am still happy I managed to set my routine the way I can achieve full potential. I can go tweak from here.

Here is my time tracking report of 82 hours of side projects:

Most of the time I spent on my main side project Taco digest. To be fair the project is already launched (you can check it out on https://tacodigest.com). But it happened only in December so I won't spend too much time talking about it.

21 hours on YouTube is exactly the amount I would love to spend on it and my posting schedule was perfect.

The learning section includes two things: the "Master of YouTube" course by Matt D'Avella and cards for my driving exam. I am going to get a driving license here in Georgia at the beginning of 2022. I am also happy that in November writing retrospective took me only 1:50 compared to 5 hours in October. It's not something I want to spend too many hours on. About two hours I spent on my Telegram channel. I am trying to be more regular with it. The downside that you can see on the graph that I had almost zero weekends and it's something I want to fix. I'll be working on maintaining the same routine but with two full weekend days.

📺 YouTube

This month my posting schedule was perfect. I posted 4 videos, one per week and it's exactly my plan to maintain. I posted two videos on the Russian channel and two on the English one. It was videos about finding an apartment in Tbilisi and the cost of living in Tbilisi. One thing I started to regret a little was that I have two channels. It would be much easier and smarter to grow one channel and then add a second as the first one succeeded. I'm still thinking about this but now I don't want to drop neither of them. I decided to grow both channels to 1k subs and 4k watch hours to enable monetization and then decide. At least I'll see the picture with my RPM and can plan for the future. I don't do YouTube to make money but I still shouldn't forget about that part.

Let's dive into stats related to YouTube in November:

🇬🇧 Channel in English (totals on 09.12):

• ⭐️ +59 new subscribers - total 653 (-6% from October) 🔵
• ⭐️ +3.7k views - total 83.5k (-3% from September) 🔵
• ⭐️ +223.2 hours watch time - total 5k (-3% from September) 🔵
• ⭐️ 5.8% Average Impression click through rate (-0.8 from September) 🔴⬇️
• ⭐️ 34.8% Average percentage viewed (+0 from September) 🔵

Channel in Russian (totals on 09.12):

• ⭐️ +185 new subscribers - total 592 (+263% from October) ✅⬆️⬆️
• ⭐️ +8.2k views - total 28.8k (+138**%** from September) ✅⬆️⬆️
• ⭐️ +769.3 hours watch time - total 2.7k (+118**%** from September) ✅⬆️⬆️
• ⭐️ 7.1% Average Impression click through rate (+0.7 from September) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ 49.8% Average percentage viewed (+1.9 from September) ✅⬆️

As you can see, the Russian channel is growing soo much faster in and I still don't have a real explanation for that. It's probably a cumulative effect of those:

• less competition
• videos about Georgia are much more interesting for a Russian audience
• I am a native speaker which means I can add some inside jokes and little details

I can't explain the difference in "average click-through rate" though. I use the same thumbnails and titles for both channels. Less competition could be the reason. For example, there were around 4-5 good videos in English about the Cost of living in Georgia and none in Russian.

It's funny because making videos in Russian is also SO MUCH easier for me 🙂

From other good YouTube news, I meet a person who's watching my videos outside. The guy approached me in the area where I live and asked if I'm the guy from the videos about Georgia. 😅 It was shocking because it's never happened to me before. Anyway, we talked a little about Tbilisi for expats and even meet again in a few days and chat more. So everything was great!

Also, my Russian channel got a pretty good boost. One of the big Georgian bloggers shared my telegram post with video link. It got me 1.5k Telegram views of the post and a huge boost in video views.

The same blogger is also starting his Telegram channel in English. He asked me if I can promote this channel on my English-speaking YouTube and he will promote me back. So I'll do this in my next video.

👨‍💻 Side projects

🌮 Taco digest

We went with full power on Taco digest because we wanted to launch it at the beginning of December and we did. The launch was not so good as I expected but still okay.

In November, we finished all the main features we wanted to build and launched a landing page. Google is finally approved my YouTube API quota increase. Even Twitter launched their API v2 which I managed to get access to. For some reason, they always declined me access to their API v1. So I even started working on Twitter integration but it didn't get into the release version. It'll be ready soon.

We already closed our Linear project but you can see how we tripled the effort on it during the last months.

✍️ Writing

I don't put much effort in my writing for now. The only things I write are these retrospectives, a few tweets and posts to my Telegram channel. I still didn't start with my travel/nomad content. I'll make some time for it in 2022.

Telegram channel

I published 10 posts on my telegram channel, finally making it more/less consistent. I usually spend around one hour once in two weeks and write all the posts for the next two weeks and schedule them.

⭐️ As I said in the YouTube section, one of the bloggers in Georgia reposted my video on their channel and it gained me new Telegram subscribers. In November, I got from 248 to 271 adding 12 new subscribers.

You can see the huge boost in views the day he shared my post:

💰 Money and FIRE

Everything is stable with money and savings. We earned some income and contributed to investments. We have a new plan for the next year which affect our finances dramatically but I'll write about it later.

The FIRE number goal looks the same in the stats below but it's only because I adjusted the goal. I calculate it based on our annual spending from the last years. This month I added 3 more years to the table making the total goal bigger.

Also, I am very happy to see that invested allocations are growing, and cash part is decreasing.

FIRE stats:

• ⭐️ I stand on 17.89% towards my FIRE goal number.
• ⭐️ My Net Worth grew +12% in November.
• ⭐️ My current Net worth allocations: 42.97% invested + 58.12% in cash.

Assets allocation:

• ⭐️ 29.36% S&P500 index fund
• ⭐️ 35.86% VTI Total US Stock index fund
• ⭐️ 13.53% NASDAQ index fund
• ⭐️ 7.30% VXUS Total International Stock index fund (no US)
• ⭐️ 7.15% Other stock and bonds
• ⭐️ 6.80% Cryptocurrency

We're increasing Vanguard funds and reducing old Russian ETFs. The goal is to completely remove Russian assets but it'll take some time. Especially for the ones in the red zone like gold funds and bonds.

I'm quite happy with my 80% VTI + 20% VXUS strategy for the future and I'll stick with it. It excludes Crypto which I still don't know how much I want but around 5% is good.

🎮 Reading and Entertainment

I started reading Dune by Frank Herbert. It's been on my watchlist for a while and movie launch was a good nudge to finally read it. I started reading it in English but after ~10% switched to the Russian version because it was quite hard. So many little details and descriptions and names. I finished about 60% so went to see a movie and it was awesome. The cinematography is through the roof.

I am still playing Persona 5 Royal making it already 86 hours in total which means I spent about 40 hours in November.

But I also bought a Nintendo Switch! 🥳 I wanted to buy it for a long time and finally made the decision and so far I am happy with the console. It is convenient and has so many great games.

The only downside is the cost of the games. PS4 and PC games became so cheap during the last few years especially if you buy on sales, but Switch prices are huge! But I am happy with the purchase anyway. My first game will be "Ori and the blind forest".

I'm trying to finish all my games I have on PS4. There is a big chance I'll drop PS4 back to Russia next year and continue to travel with Switch only.

That’s all for November! I’ll be back with my 2021 review! 🍾🥂 This year was fascinating.

If you are curious about last month's retrospective where I explain the idea behind those posts, you can find it here.

⏰ Time

In October I spend 68 hours working at my main job and 40.5 hours working on my side projects. It's actually a good result, considering I only have time during the second part of the month.

Here is a review of where my "side project" time went:

What was a surprise for me is that writing last month's retrospective took me 5 hours. I am still pretty bad at writing and the speed is slow. But from this month I've decided to put much less effort into it. I also have a template now so it should be much faster.

An extra hour of blogging activity is my Telegram channel post.

As I said last month I need to double the effort on my current side project and I did. The project is now much closer to launch.

YouTube took 14 hours and it's a pretty good result for the half of the month I've got. I usually try to reserve one hour in the morning for YouTube so it's somewhat accurate.

I am quite happy with this month's results and I'm looking forward to what I can do in November.

📺 YouTube

Not much happened with my channel in October. Just a slow growth and it's normal.

During 14 hours I created and uploaded two videos - one on the Russian channel and one on the English one.

It was a collaborative video with my wife about 3 years of travelling and digital nomading. What we learned during this period and some tips for the audience. The video wasn't a success on both channels although it performed a bit better on the Russian one.

Let's dive into stats:

🇬🇧 English Channel:

• ⭐️ +63 new subscribers - total on 04.11 - 580 (+37% from September) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ +3.8k views - total on 04.11 - 79.2k (+19% from September) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ +229.6 hours watch time - total 4.7k (+22% from September) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ 6.6% Average Impression click through rate (-0.2 from September) 🔵↕️
• ⭐️ 34.8% Average percentage viewed (+7 from September) ✅⬆️

Russian Channel:

• ⭐️ +51 new subscribers - total on 04.11 - 379 (-55% from September) 🔴⬇️
• ⭐️ +3.5k views - total on 04.11 - 18.8k (-36% from September) 🔴⬇️
• ⭐️ +352.2 hours watch time - total 1.8k (-24% from September) 🔴⬇️
• ⭐️ 6.4% Average Impression click through rate (+1.3 from September) ✅⬆️
• ⭐️ 47.7% Average percentage viewed (+6.5 from September) ✅⬆️

👨‍💻 Side projects

🌮 Taco digest

I am happy with the results I reached this month for the main project I'm working on. My wife also helps me with design so it's her achievement as well. We came much closer to launch and I am going to do it this month. There are a few critical bugs to solve. I am also still in the middle of a conversation with Google to increase their YouTube API quota. The default quota is ridiculously small and I can't launch with it. Besides, I want to launch this project with payment from day one. It will have a free tier but paid tier will be accessible as well. For that, I need to add a payment system which will be Paddle for the lack of alternatives in my country. Short overview from the linear on how the project is going. You can see that curve in October is much steep than before meaning I am making good progress. Oh and I deployed it on Heroku as well 🥳 Let's see if I can meet the deadline and launch it this month.

✍️ Writing

I want to get into writing but it is not my priority for now. I'm going to take the whole month somewhere next year and spend it on writing.

✉️ Telegram channel

I continue to write for my Russian Telegram channel ("AnotherWayOut") but it's not a very prioritized task. It's a place where I enjoy writing in my native language and my replacement for Instagram. In October I published 5 posts and scheduled another 3 or 4. It took me one hour so it's a great result.

A little summary:

• ⭐️ Published 5 new posts
• ⭐️ +8 new subscribers - total 246 on 04.11

✉️ Email newsletter

This month I was exploring another opportunity for writing. I want to find a place like my Telegram channel but for writing in English. After a little exploration, I realized that Telegram channels are pretty much dead in English. My conclusion was that the best place to write for an English audience is an email newsletter.

For now, I only created and designed my newsletter page but hopefully, I'll start writing there soon. If you are curious here is the page: https://dpashutskii.substack.com/

I picked Getrevue (no longer exists) as a platform because it seems simple and it allows you to integrate your newsletter on your Twitter profile, which is cool.

💰 Money and FIRE

I and my wife are rushing from one idea to another where we should live in the next year and further. We're waiting for Canada to open its immigration programs for 6 months already and nothing seems to be changing in that regard. We were considering many countries where we want to settle and wait for Canada. We even almost decide to go to Portugal on their D7 visa next year.

But eventually, our goal of doing FIRE was the main point on staying in Georgia. We're quite happy here, at least for the next couple of years. While Canada is still closed, we decided to stay and focus on savings. Georgia is great for saving because it's a cheap country and we have a company with a 1% income tax here. You probably won't find smaller income tax anywhere in the world. They also allow you to get any foreign passive income tax-free such as dividends, royalty, capital gains etc.

In October, I was shifting my assets to Interactive brokers from my Russian bank and everything went smoothly. Even international transfer from Georgian bank is quite cheap. I was afraid that Wire transfer could take big fees on the road but it didn't.

I still have some investments in my Russian account but they are down so I'll sell them later.

FIRE stats:

• ⭐️ I stand on 17.69% towards my FIRE goal number.
• ⭐️ My Net Worth growth +13.7% in September.
• ⭐️ My current Net worth allocations: 37.37% invested + 65.65% in cash.

This was a great month of growth and increasing investment part with new broker.

Assets allocation:

• ⭐️ 35.3% S&P500 index fund
• ⭐️ 23.62% VTI Total US Stock index fund
• ⭐️ 16.98% NASDAQ index fund
• ⭐️ 5.47% VXUS Total International Stock index fund (no US)
• ⭐️ 9.66% Other stock and bonds
• ⭐️ 8.90% Cryptocurrency

I finally have my hands on these awesome Vanguard index funds and I moved everything there.

The reason why there are still so many in old funds is that my wife didn't move her assets yet.

My current strategy will be dead simple 80% VTI + 20% VXUS. Yes, no bonds, huge part of stocks are US market. And crypto only what I already have, want to down it to 3-5% and then think about it.

Right now I also considering real estate but I only learning so nothing happening there yet. Even not sure if I am gonna go for a physical property or something like REIT.

🎮 Reading and Entertainment

In October I finished reading “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by Chris Voss. The book is quite good but if you don't revise knowledge from it, it will fade away. I am trying to do this via Kindle highlights and email newsletter but not sure if it helps. Anyway, I've got some good tips from the book and I hope I'll apply them in life.

I am still playing Persona 5 Royal making it about ~40 hours in total which means I spend about 20 hours in October.

Since we're both gamers with my wife we have to share PS4 and in the latter half of the month, she was playing. I tried to find good games on M1 Mac but the support isn't that good.

I ended up starting FFXIV which is technically a MMORPG. I am playing it just because Final Fantasy is my favourite game series and it has a great story (yeah MMORPG with a story, I know!). So far I like it and the game is quite easy-going so it's great relaxation after a busy day.

That's all about October! I'll be back with November Retrospective and follow up with the 2021 review! 🍾🥂

The main goal is to reflect and better understand how productive was the time in the last month.

Since this is the first time I'll also describe a bit more about my projects and what I'm working on.

⏰ Time

Let's start with time management. I track all my work and side projects time so I can easily answer the question "Where all the time go?!". My team uses Harvest at work and I use it for invoicing (as a part-time contractor) as well. For personal projects, I use Toggl Track with all my projects.

In September, I spent 89 hours working at my job and I have 32.5 clocked hours among different projects.

Here is a detailed review of Toggl Track:

YouTube took most of my time in September.

"Slowandsteady" is the name of my new travel blog that I've been planning to start since the beginning of time. Finally, I launched it.

"Mail digest" is the main side project I'm working on right now and I should have spend more time on it, to be honest. I'll try to focus on it in October.

📺 YouTube

One of my 2021 resolutions was to restore my YouTube channel and I did. I've had great progress in that area since summer. I am enjoying making YouTube videos. Even if I am far from success by any means I'll continue pursuing this side hustle. Because I enjoy it so much, money is not an essential thing here.

YouTube is quite a rewarding platform. Without many subscribers, I have a decent amount of views/engagement/new people met. Just because of my videos and it's awesome.

I have two channels: the English channel and the Russian channel. I prepare the same content and record it in two languages and post it on different channels. I am still looking for my niche and trying to experiment with different topics. The main areas are travel, digital nomad lifestyle and remote work. Occasionally, I post something related to software development.

The whole motto of the channel is to learn programming and travel the world or be a nomad. Like me, yes. 😎

Besides, I enjoy making "destination reviews" which are kinda city guides for nomads. I always look for such videos when I am picking a new place to visit so I hope other people find it useful too.

It seems people are loving watching about these topics nowadays and I have some stuff to share with them.

Let's get back to September and my progress on the YouTube channel.

During these 14 hours you've seen in the Time report, I made and posted 3 videos. One for Russian Channel and two for the English channel. My minimum goal is one video per week so I am a bit behind.

I had two great milestones this month. I reached 500 subscribers on the English channel and 300 subscribers on the Russian one.

Below are the main stats on the channel for September.

🇬🇧English Channel:

• ⭐️ +46 new subscribers - total 515 (+92% from August)
• ⭐️ +3210 views - total 75k (-6% from August)
• ⭐️ +188.3 hours watch time - total 4500 (+4% from August)
• ⭐️ 6.8% Impression click through rate (+0.5 from August)
• ⭐️ 34.1% Average view duration (+4 from August)

Russian Channel:

• ⭐️ +113 new subscribers - total 515 (+49% from August)
• ⭐️ +5379 views - total 15.5k (+108% from August)
• ⭐️ +460.8 hours watch time - total 1500 (+68% from August)
• ⭐️ 5.1% Impression click through rate (-0.8 from August)
• ⭐️ 41.2% Average view duration (-6.9 from August)

👨‍💻 Side projects

🌮 Taco digest

The main project I working on is called "Taco Digest". It's gonna be a customizable personal mail digest. I am working on this project for way too long already. I hope I'll finish MVP as fast as possible.

This month I did some progress on improving the look and functionality of the mail digest editor. Also, I've added YouTube as a new source for digests. Now you can track new videos from your favourite creators.

I have to spend more time in October to focus on important tasks. At least deploy the project to production and start using it myself. A have a few critical things yet to finish but I'll get there soon.

A small overview of project progress provided by Linear app:

I set the deadline date for MVP to the 1st of November and I hope I manage to at least deploy something usable before that date.

🧳 SlowAndSteadyBlog

Another project that take time this month was my travel blog. I am not planning to write in it yet. I wanted to publish it, so Google could start crawling my pages. I only have two articles but the blog itself looks good enough so I don't worry about it much. I'll let it soak for Google and come back to it later.

I build it with NextJS, using tailwind-blog-template as a foundation. It's my first blog on NextJS after using Gatsby for a while and I am quite happy with this framework.

The only thing I still need to fix is image optimization. Images take too long to load and there are no blurry placeholders as it was by default with Gatsby.

✍️ Writing and social media

I want to start writing more articles but so far I didn't have much progress on it in September.

This post is one step to writing more to this blog and I'll come back to my travel blog soon.

✉️ Telegram channel

Another place where I write is my Russian telegram channel. In case you don't know it is similar to email newsletters but inside the messenger. People can follow your channel to read your posts and they can comment.

There are no rules on what to post on your channel so every channel owner uses it differently. Some people share big posts there and others treat it as social media with short and frequent messages.

I am somewhere in the middle. I post semi-long articles but also post some photos/videos from time to time. The main topics for the channel are the same as for my YouTube: travel, nomadic lifestyle and remote work.

A few stats from September for my channel AnotherWayOut:

• ⭐️ Published 6 new posts
• ⭐️ +4 new subscribers - total 238
• ⭐️ 117 average views per post

Telegram is not a rewarding platform since it doesn't have any discovery features or SEO doesn't work here. That's why I don't put much effort into it. It's more like my own very small social media where I share discoveries and don't worry much about exposure.

I also post links to my Russian videos there which gains me a few views. This channel will be much more useful once I get a bigger subscriber base on my YouTube channel.

🤳 Social

I don't focus on any social media right now. I was active on Instagram for the last year but it gets me no advantages at all. A week ago, as a blessing in disguise, Instagram blocked my account. They terminated my account for the usage of a third-party app for analytics. They blacklisted my devices so if I try to create a new account it gets immediately suspended.

I figured it's a good sign to stop using this social media and focus on more long-term platforms. Creating evergreen content feels more productive and enjoyable thing to do.

I was thinking about ditching Instagram for a while so I am okay about what happened.

I have Twitter but I don't use it much except scrolling it for a few minutes during the day.

I post there some news or my discoveries but nothing serious. Twitter is an amazing tool for building in public so I'll be using it more in the future.

💰 Money and FIRE

I discovered the concept of FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) In 2020 and it was my goal ever since.

I don't consider FIRE as my endpoint as some people on Reddit. Sitting and doing nothing seems like a terrible idea for me.

What I want is to reach Financial Independence so I don't need to worry about the money anymore. I would love to focus on my passions and side projects without thinking about money.

The first step of the FIRE journey is to set your goal number and unfortunately, I can't do this yet. The reason is that I am travelling and moving places so I don't know where I end up living in the future.

I did some calculations based on my last years and COL of some places where I could imagine settling down. After reaching this number I can be sure I can either travel or move to one of the destinations.

A few statistics and numbers:

• ⭐️ I stand on 10.61% towards my FIRE goal number.
• ⭐️ My Net Worth growth +4.7% in September.
• ⭐️ My current Net worth allocations: 30.61% invested + 73.20% in cash.

I spend way too much money in September because I bought MacBook, Apple Watch and send my Mom on a vacation.

Autumn and winter months I usually spend much less. I live in Tbilisi now which is a low cost of living place. Plus, I opened a company here which gave me a pretty nice income tax benefit. So I'll save more in the upcoming months.

I still have quite a huge chunk of cash, most of it is on deposit accounts. It's fine for now because I'm going to move to Canada which could lead to some expenses.

My investment allocations:

• ⭐️ 49.2% S&P500 index fund
• ⭐️ 23.7% NASDAQ index fund
• ⭐️ 15% Other stock and bonds
• ⭐️ 11.2% Cryptocurrency

Soon I'll move my investments from the Russian platform to US-based Interactive Brokers. It'll allow me to pick from much wide variety of Index Funds and pay much fewer fees. In Russia, there are about ~30 index funds in total and fees management fees are around 0.8%-0.9%.

Another bad thing about my investments is the amount of cryptocurrency. I am aiming to reduce it to 3-5%.

I bought them quite a while ago and since it was growing crazy it takes a huge percentage of the portfolio now.

Otherwise, I am quite happy with all my investments and I'll continue to contribute to them monthly.

🎮 Reading and Entertainment

This is an optional part but it could be fun to add it.

In my spare time, I enjoy reading, watching TV shows and playing video games. I was into movies my whole life but I've reached the point where I watched all the great movies. Something good rarely comes up nowadays so I don't watch movies much.

The main console I am playing is Playstation 4. I would love to upgrade it to the 5th version but it's so huge I can't travel with it.

I am considering buying Nintendo Switch though. I was a gamer my whole life and focus on good single-player games with a good story. I rarely play multiplayer or online games.

📚 Reading

In September, I finished "The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life" by J.L. Collins.

It's an amazing book with an introduction to financial independence and investments. I would recommend reading it to anyone who wants to start this path. There are few criticisms of this book that is very focused on the US market and life in the US in general but I don't see it as a problem.

The author describes a lot of concepts that could work anywhere. Also, the US is one of the dominant markets for investments, so everyone is investing there anyway.

Right now I am reading "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" by Chris Voss.

I don' have an opinion on the book yet. It feels like one of these books that you enjoy reading but don't get to apply the knowledge from it in real life.

I've started using an app called 'Reading Notes". It scans your Kindle highlights and sends you a random one every day to email. It should improve memorizing stuff from the books. With it, I might be able to pick up more from that book.

🎮 Video games

I started September by playing Days Gone but got a little bit bored of repetitive quests of the game. Although, the vibe in the game is awesome. I enjoy this The Walking Dead type of atmosphere.

Halfway through the month, I bought Persona 5 Royal on discount and completely drowned in the game. I am a huge fan of Japanese video games, especially JRPGs and this game is a gem of that genre. It is so addictive and enjoyable I am happy I picked it up. I already played around 15 hours in it.

That's all for the September of 2021 retrospective.

I enjoyed writing this, feels like journaling in public. I hope I'll make a habit of this. It's gonna be interesting to compare all the results during the longer periods.

If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to reach me on Twitter. If you also write similar retrospectives, I would love to read yours and inspire.

See you in November 👋

I've been living in Bali for 15 months in a row in 2019-2021. I'm always tracking my spending numbers. So I collected average numbers on how much it costs to live in Bali, Indonesia.

You should read this with a grain of salt because all lifestyles are different. You could spend more or less than me. I am trying to live on a budget but maintain comfort. So my cost of living it's something average for nomads/expats.

Bali is a big place and I've been living in "digital nomad" areas: Canggu, Pererenan, Kerobokan, Pererenan, and Ubud. There are more "local" areas where you can expect cheaper prices.

I live with my wife so most of our costs are true for couples. But I'll try to break down the price for single people.

All prices in the article are in US dollars adjusted for the average exchange rate in 2020: 100,000 IDR for 7$.

I have a video about this topic on my YouTube channel, check it out:

🏡 Accommodation

This is the most expensive category but it depends on your appetite for comfort. You can find a very simple guest houses for 300$ but also very expensive private villas for 2000$.

I've lived in different types of places. I prefer a one bedroom with private kitchen, desk for work and sometimes pool. It usually includes cleaning 2-3 times per week and doesn't include electricity.

Most of the time we pay around 500-700$ per month. During the COVID-19 we pay the same but get more space for the same amount. Electricity is expensive in Bali. You can add 60-80$ to the total price. That's the price I recommend to count on, especially if you're going to stay for more than one month.

This category doesn't split if you're alone. Unlikely you will find the place for one than will be cheaper than for two people. But you can find a nice villa and share it with your friends. In that case, you'll spend the same but the place will be better.

💰 Average Cost: ~650$ for one person and a couple.

🍲 Eat out

Since this is South East Asia, most of the time I eat out. Cafés/restaurants are very different from each other. There are tons of warung's (local eatery) with pretty good food as cheap as 1-1.5$ per dish. But there are many hipster style restaurants where the dish could easily cost you 7-8$. And your budget will depend on your choice.

We usually go to places with average prices and very rarely order drinks. Besides, we have breakfast at home most days. Even by cutting down one meal in the restaurant per day, you can save some money. It's cheaper to cook at home but the difference is not so dramatic as in western countries.

💰 Average cost: 175$ for one person / 350$ for a couple.

🧀 Grocery

Since we don't cook at home much we don't spend much money in this category. We buy stuff for breakfast, cheese, eggs, bread, fruits, and bakery from time to time. It doesn't include household items but you can expect a lot of them provided by your host.

On average the price for groceries is the same as in Russia or European countries. Some stuff is more expensive like some vegetables, cheese, and dairy. But the fruits are much cheaper.

💰 Average cost: 80$ for one person / 160$ for a couple.

🛫 Planes/Visas

If you want to stay in Bali (or anywhere in Indonesia) for a long time you have to do visa-runs. There is an option to get a social visa for 6 months but in that case, you can't leave the country. And you still need to extend the social visa every month so the expenses are similar.

Visa on arrival for 30 days at the airport + 30 days extension with a local agency will cost you 105$. You must do it only once per two months so let's count that as a 50$ monthly cost. After two months when the visa expires you have to leave the country. The cheapest options are Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or Singapore. Please double check your visa status for each country. But for most passports they allow you to get a free visa on arrival.

The average price for two ways tickets is 250$. And again we can split it because it's once per two-month activity. It leaves us with 125$ per person per month.

💰 Average cost: 175$ for one person / 350$ for a couple.

🛵 Transport

In most parts of South East Asia, you can rent a scooter/motorcycle pretty cheap. In Bali rent a scooter + gas costs around 100$-150$. This price is for the most popular automatic scooters: Honda Vario, Yamaha N-Max, Honda Scoopy.

If you are a motorcycle enthusiast you can find a wide range of different motorcycles. If you like you can even order a custom one. It will cost you more so do your research on that topic. It could make sense to buy a motorcycle if you came here for a long time. I don't recommend buying a scooter though. To make this deal worthwhile you have to live in Bali for more than three years. And don't forget about maintaining costs.

If you like cars it's an option as well. But be ready that driving could be hard compared to your home country (unless you're from Asia). Many dogs, scooters, roosters, people on the road will make driving the car here a hard task. You also will likely spend more time in traffic jams. I've never rented a car here but the price is around 400-500$ per month for the cheapest models.

The scooters are much more common and many couples rent one bike for two.

💰 Average cost: 100$ for one person and a couple.

👩‍💼 Insurance

It's very important to have insurance when you're traveling or staying abroad. There is a lot of dangerous situations in Bali that could lead to medical help need.

Since we discovered Safety Wings we're only buying this insurance for all our trips. I recommend you to take a look at them. It costs only around 45$ dollars per month but covers most of the situation you can find you in.

Luckily, I've never had to use that insurance so I can't say how good the service is. There are different stories on the Internet so I'd recommended you to do some research. There are not so many options out there so I, personally, continue to rely on them.

💰 Average price: 40$ for one person / 80$ for a couple.

🛸 Other

You'll likely need other unpredictable expenses. It's always a good idea to have some extra savings with you. For example, you may need medicine, bath accessories, bars and alcohol, movies, gym, surfing, and other activities. By the way, the gym membership costs about 100$ per month which is crazy-expensive. You can find the cheaper local gym options without AC.

Besides, you might want to buy some clothes or electronics. To be safe you should have at least an extra 200$ per month.

💰 Average price: 200$ for one person / 400$ for a couple.

💰 Summary

In summary, you can comfortably live in Bali for ~1400$ per month or ~2000$ for a couple. You can decrease or increase this amount. When we were on the budget when we first time visited the island we managed to survive on less than 1000$ as a couple. So it's possible.

Also, I made a summary Google sheets table for better visibility.

I hope this guide gave you some ideas on how much money you need to save or what income do you need to spend time in Bali. If you have any questions you can reach me out on Instagram. If you like my content you can share it on social media or subscribe to my newsletter. I'll send you an email when the new post comes out.

Good year

This year was one of the hardest in the new century. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the whole planet. I still can't believe we're living in that time. Sometimes I hope it's all movie or I'm dreaming. But it is what it is and we have to adjust to the new "normal".

For me the hardest part of the year was March. I and my wife had planned our flights in March and it was so frustrating and exhausting to figure out what to do. Also in March, we spend at home 30 or 40 days straight trying to isolate ourselves which added a lot of anxiety. I got a lot of mental problems and depression around that time of the year.

But later it's started getting better. The world was learning how to live in this new state and we were too. We started getting our heads around new behavior in public. We were getting used to wearing masks everywhere and spending more time at home. I feel incredibly lucky that when it all started I have been in Bali and I decided to stay here longer. We have not so many cases here. Not sure if it's climate or fewer people density but the situation is much better than in some parts of Europe. Most of the year we spent enjoying this beautiful island without many limitations.

And once I started feeling more secure and safe I started to enjoy this time more. It was a year of self-reflection, new experiments, and thinking. Since I didn't travel and most of the time spend at home I had more time on my hands than before. Also, I started thinking about health and life more and making smarter decisions.

In summary, I can say it was a good year for me. Like everyone, I want the end of the pandemic. But I can say I squeezed as much lemonade as I could.

Goals

Last year I posted a tweet with my goals for the year and I want to reflect on them and review what worked out and what didn't.

Here is what I tweeted:

🚢 Finish at least 2 side projects. One with monetization.

🎓 Finish the university and get the diploma

📦 Move to another country in the EU

👨‍💻 Grow in programming (Rails + React)

✍️ Write more on the blog

📺 Come back to YouTube

Side projects - ✅

The goal was to finish at least two side projects. One of them should have some kind of monetization. I wanted to work on my projects in my free time but I am pretty bad at combining my job and side-projects.

In March I launched my first project - Arcade Hub. And then an interesting thing happened. I decided to completely quit my job and work on my projects full time. With a few friends, we organized 12xstartup.com - a challenge where we're working on 12 projects for 12 months. I started in November and launched my second project in December - Learning Story.

I can say this goal is completed. Unfortunately, I still didn't earn any money on them. But I hope the next year should change that. I am super excited to work on them in 2021.

University - ✅

After 3.5 years I finally completed my university and got a Bachelor's degree in Computer engineering. I had a diploma defense in October and got a 100 out of 110 scores. Which is pretty cool. I am happy to finish this chapter of my life because I am not a big fan of academic education. I wouldn't go to university if it wasn't required for most of the immigration programs. It was fun but I know how to spend my time better 😃

Moving abroad - ⏸

I postponed this goal because of the pandemic. I and my wife also re-reviewed our goals for immigration and we decided to change the plans. The original plan was to find a job in the EU (Germany or the Netherlands) and move there on job visas. Now we decided that we want more flexibility. We don't want to be locked on a work permit so we started to discover more options. At the same time, we released that we want to try to live in North America so we started to look there.

Eventually, we decided to move to Canada on the Express Entry program. Canada immediately grants you Permanent Residency and you free to do whatever you want. We're also participating in the US Green Card lottery. We'll see the results in May and then move depends on them. The chances to win a lottery are very small so it's 98% we're moving to Canada.

We even picked the city and it's going to be Vancouver, British Columbia. I hope everything will go as planned and the 2021 review I'll be writing from my apartment in Vancouver.

Recently, I visited a podcast where I talked with a couple who has moved to Vancouver a couple of years ago. I asked a lot of questions about the city and living in Canada. You can check it out here if you're interested.

Learning - ✅

I've been learning a lot of programming last year. I won't be setting such a goal anymore because it became my routine. I was focusing on Ruby and Rails this year but I was doing a lot of JS development as well.

I also started learning Python in 2020. I've only learned basics and haven't coded anything serious on it but I'll do it this year.

Apart from programming, I've been bouncing around different areas of learning this year. I've been learning drawing, photography, and filmmaking, SEO and writing, business, and marketing. And my favorite one - surfing. I fell in love with this sport and I make sure to surf as much as possible until we leave Bali for good.

Writing - 🚫

I've been setting the goal "to write more" for the recent 3 years and most of the years I failed. I am still not sure about the reasons but I can't fit it into my routine. I wrote something during the year but it's a very small amount. So far my most successful writing experience is my telegram channel in Russian. But even there I am not so much active.

Apart from that, I have this blob but it is pretty much empty. It seems I'm enjoying tweaking and developing a blog more than actually write in it.

This year is going to be my last year when I'll try to pursue writing. If I fail this year I'll drop these attempts. It won't be a necessarily bad thing, it'll just mean it's not for me.

Come back to YouTube - ⏸

This was a very exciting goal for me but I couldn't find time for it in 2020.

I love YouTube and I already have a travel channel which I enjoyed working on so much in the past. This year I'm starting from the only goal to come back to videomaking. I'll post about it more soon. Maybe I'll find making video much more enjoyable and make it my routine instead of writing 😅

You can check it out here: https://app.getlearningstory.com/.

Idea

I came up with this idea about 6 months ago. I love learning and it strikes me that there is no centralized community for learning new things. Most of the communities I know attached to specific courses. There are great ones like FreeCodeCamp or Coursera. But they focused on the course materials.

Another thing I love is learning in public. It's an amazing way to expand your network, teach others, and also soak up the material better by reviewing things. Learning in public in the tech world is usually happening on people's blogs and Twitter. There are popular Twitter challenges like #100DaysOfCode or #javascript30. These challenges helped me and other people to learn to code. And there are amazing blogs out there but it doesn't count as community.

So the idea was to create the website in social media style. You can post your daily learning reviews and discuss them with others. In contrast to Twitter, I can add any features for encouraging people to learn. Like gamification, leaderboards, etc. And all the posts will be focused on learning. Whereas on Twitter it's usually buried down and hashtags are not helping.

Apart from the tech community, I also wanted to allow people to learn other things. I've never heard about good learning communities in Sport, Business, Foreign languages, etc.

Implementation

So I've focused on the main features to make MVP as quickly as possible. But even that I was cutting the features I've still spent too much time on MVP without showing it to the public.

I've spent too much on CSS and UX/UI. I could have published it without "Goal" and "Leaderboard" features. But that's great discoveries, that's why I'm doing this challenge.

In the end, I got the product with features:

• Ability to journal and post your daily learning review.
• Leaderboard and scoring system. I calculate the scores based on the user's activity on the website: active days and streaks.
• Discuss section so the user can post the comments.
• Categories for learning topics. I can add filtration based on them later.
• And the last feature is the goals. Which is your personal to-do list.

Launch

So far I launched "Learning Story" on Twitter, IndieHackers, and Makerlog. I've also sent the email to 38 people who dropped their email on my landing page. I got 479 visitors during the week after launch and 209 of them were on the website on the first day. Besides, I've posted a small post on my "BuyMeACoffee" page to announce the product there.

I am planning to share the website on the ProductHunt, Reddit, and HackerNews in the next week.

So far the most frustrating part was the lack of feedback and I can't say I learned how to collect it better.

I've asked for feedback on the website and any launching posts. Also, I've added a small chat on the website for easy communication.

I got some feedback but not so much. I wish I can learn somehow what people didn't like or liked on the platform. Perhaps they were expecting something different, maybe they are not interested in general. I still have to learn how to do it.

Another launch mistake was to hide the community feed under "Sign up"/"Sign in". It was like I'm forcing everyone to sign up without peeking into the community itself. I've already fixed this and make most of the pages public.

So far I have not so many users but they are slowly joining and I hope I can grow the community over time.

What's next?

Currently, I'm working on the mobile view and improving the general user experience. I'm also going to add notifications so people can see when someone's posted a comment. After I started using the platform I felt that this feature is missing.

In December I'm switching to the new product but I'll continue working on "Learning Story" to make it better.

If you want to share and learn with us, sign up on getlearningstory.com!

Digital entrepreneurs were a huge inspiration for me and it made me think that I want to try myself in this area.

To be honest I know very little about the business side of things. I am a regular programmer. Most of the time I learn about things related to the IT world or somethings around.

That's why it is going to be a great challenge for me. I have the skills to implement the ideas but I don't know how to validate, market, and sell the products. I am planning to learn on the way and achieve as much as possible for the next 12 months.

Perfect conditions

Right now it's a perfect time for me to start:

• I am finishing and defending my Bachelor's degree in October.
• My current contract with my employer ends on October 14th. I am not going to extend it.
• COVID-19 is still here so I don't travel much.
• I "stuck" in Bali which is cheap so I don't spend much money on living.

I decided to dive into the entrepreneur's world for the whole year until November 2021. Or until I realize it's not for me 😃

Challenge goals

The main goal is pretty simple: make something profitable.

Small goal is to reach ramen profitability which is about €1000-1500 MRR for me.

The big goal is to make it profitable enough to exceed the developer's salary (Around €80-90k ARR). It is a huge load of money so I don't have many expectations about this. But it's great to have a big goal.

I am planning to make all process public using the Makerlog community, posts in this blog, and my Twitter. I will be as open as I could and I want to make my products transparent as well. At least with open revenue and statistics following the open startup movement.

I understand all the risks and if I can't achieve anything and don't earn even a few bucks I will be fine. The experience and the learnings will still be valuable.

I don't have a problems to get back being software engineer.

12xStartup

After I've decided to make this happen I've got a message from a friend from the blogging community. She wanted to create a group of people making the startups every month for 12 months in total. The inspiration comes from the Piter Levels challenge back in 2014 and we all know where he is now :)

It was a perfect opportunity for me to stay accountable and get a small community to share all the bumps on the road. So I agreed to take part in it.

Now me and 3 awesome people are doing this. You can follow our journey in here: https://12xstartup.com/.

In theory we will ship 48 startups by the end of 2021. Of course it could be less or more, it doesn't matter that much.

Follow me

If you want to follow my progress you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my blog updates with the form below. Besides, I will add the progress report by each project on the website.

If you have any questions, suggestion or wanna chat, Twitter is the best way to reach me out.

I know there are a lot of developer's stories like this, so it's my turn to write one 😃. I hope my story could inspire or push someone in the right direction. And throw off some prejudices about starting to learn code when you're 30 or without a tech degree.

In addition at the end of the post, I added my advice to the beginners.

Starting my career

Somewhere in 2015-2016, I was working as a System administrator in one of the biggest telecom companies in Russia and my manager asked me to do some automation tasks. I wasn't a good SysAdmin because it was the first time I need to do this. He gave me the huge book on Unix and asked me to figure this out.

This was a turning point for me. It was an ordinary day but something clicked inside.

All my jobs before were weird. It's a funny thing to say now but I've been worrying a lot about this in the past. I always loved computers since I was a kid and there wasn't a question which industry I ended up in. But what I'm going to do within the industry was a very big question.

I spent some time in college but very fast I got bored with it (it wasn't a good school) and I dropped it in the second year

So I found myself in a situation where I had to get a job. I started with the easiest possible way of going into the IT industry - technical support. You know these guys who answer the phone when your Internet broke down. That was me. The job was very dumb and I clearly wasn't learning anything. But I didn't know what else I can do and continue to go to work every day. I tried to educate myself some related stuff of the telecom industry: networks, routing, bla bla. It was so boring and the knowledge was too theoretical. I didn't like it but kept pushing myself and felt bad when I didn't learn anything useful.

Please never do that. If you don't like the topic you're learning maybe it's not for you? Later I finally realized that and stopped torture myself with networks.

Then I tried to pivot to the system administrator. Or I thought so. Since I didn't have good knowledge about the servers most of my administration career I have been one platform specialist. I worked as a specialist of "SMS Router" in two companies. I'm sure you have no idea that these routers even exist. Neither did I. Most of my job was to check logs, change some settings, check logs again.

As you can imagine this knowledge has never come in handy in my life again.

Here I learned my second lesson - try to be more generalist than narrow specific. Especially if it's so narrow that nobody in the world knows about this.

All these jobs felt like I'm a crazy train driver pulling random levers. I never felt satisfaction on any of them and almost all the time I was frustrated and didn't know what to do next. That took me 6 years and a lot of courage to finally found that moment when I said "that's enough".

Finding the way

On the day I mentioned above I got the first time experience of some programming and I loved it! I wrote a small automation tool in bash and it worked and did something helpful.

I didn't have any programming background. I did some coding when I was a kid but it was either too hard for me to understand either too easy and unsatisfactory. It seems it should have passed 28 years before I started to appreciate the beauty of coding 😃

After that day I lit up with the idea to become a programmer. I was madly drawn to this idea. I started reading forums, websites. I discovered the thing called podcasts (they were not so popular in Russia) and started listening to everything related to programming. I understand only about 30% of everything the hosts were saying but it was so exciting!

I loved everything - community, IT area itself, coding approaches, languages. And I still love that to this day to be honest 🙃.

So the goal has been set but where do I start?

I started trying all the different code learning websites I could found. I didn't know much English back in a day so I've been researching runet. Unfortunately, most of the resources in Russian are not good. I even wanted to buy some school subscription for around 800 euro. Later I figured out they are more marketers then real programmers, thank god I didn't buy it. All the resources I tried were either confusing or tried to teach me anything but programming. How to set up a Wordpress website or something like this. I still worked full-time so there wasn't much time for learning and it has been giving me a lot of frustration.

But finally, I found one website which I still think one of the best programming courses ever - hexlet.io. Unfortunately, they still don't have much in English. They had everything you should see in the great learning courses - good quality lessons, great community and one respected hero-programmer who stands behind the project.

Back in a day, they didn't have any marketing and I have no idea how I found it in the first place. But this website changed everything. I started with their YouTube webinars where some smart guy was talking about serious and hard things. I didn't understand much but his talks were so interesting so I wanted to learn all that.

I started with PHP courses and joined the community on Slack (nowadays It's the biggest Russian-speaking code learning community). I was a lurker at first but then I started to chat more and more.

Eventually, I attended a few hexlet meetups and even was added to "chosen ones" Slack channel 😃. There were mostly the old core members of the community. I was so excited about all that! The first time I felt like I'm a part of something cool. The hexlet project had a huge impact on my progress as a programmer.

Per aspera ad astra

The world of software engineering has been dragging me on more and more but I still wasn't a programmer. I made a pretty big decision to quit my job and start full time learning to code with the goal of finding the junior position.

I still don't know if it was the right decision or not. I ended up as a programmer and everything is great in my life today but what if I'd fail? I don't know what would have happened then. So if you're thinking about doing the same, please consider all pros and cons.

Another reason why I deiced to quit my job was that my girlfriend (She is a wife now 😍) got the exchange semester in Portugal for three months. I haven't travel much back then so I decided why not to go with her and spend these 3 months of learning code.

It sounded like a great idea and we went to Lisbon for 90 days. Oh boy, how wrong I was with expectations that I'm gonna be studying. When you for the first time living abroad everything is so exciting. You are having new foreign friends among students and all students like to party and drink so much! 🥳. All that was no good for my learning plan 🤦‍♂️ The days under the hot Portugal sun have been passing very fast but I was slow in achieving my goals.

But even slow learning is still learning. I didn't understand it back then but now I know it well. Always try to compare today's yourself with yesterday's yourself and nobody else. But back then I was a bit frustrated with my progress.

Besides, Hexlet is really, really hard course. The basic idea behind it was taken from a very famous book among software engineers - SICP. With the only difference, the courses use JS/PHP as more modern languages instead of LISP. But all the concepts are still there: functional programming, immutability, recursions, data structures, abstractions. A lot of great but hard stuff for a newbie. I'm quite happy that I took that course, it affected my programming style in a lot of good ways. But I am not sure if I can recommend it to the new people at coding.

Luckily at the same time, they also created a new feature in addition to the courses, called "Projects". I was in the first stream of the students to try it out. And since it was a new feature the creator of courses himself curated it. Basically, it was 3 projects with real-world tasks and in real-world environments. We were writing the tests, setting up a dev environment, used git, etc. It gave me a huge boost in the understanding of how real development works.

I still remember how I've been writing the last project sitting in the Lisbon airport where my flight was delayed before going back to Moscow. ✈️

Real-world

My first idea after learning to code was to become a freelance developer. This year I already started to fall in love with traveling and dreamed about "digital nomad" (I didn't know the term yet) lifestyle.

But the courses brought me back to Earth and I decided I'm not ready for that. I thought I could only be a freelancer once I was a master. Now I realize it's the wrong mindset. If you want to go to freelance it's fine to go even when you're junior. But questioning yourself is the part of becoming a programmer. Impostor syndrome is a real thing and it pervasive among our community.

So I started to look for an office job. I was part of the Hexlet community and I got a huge help with CV and preparation for the interviews. I like the way how the interviews were going on the coding positions. Most of them were online tests or some coding exercises. I'm a fan of digital asynchronous communication where you have time to think and I hate phone talks where you need to answer within a few seconds.

Once again, the Hexlet community helped me here as well. The founder of the courses knew some guy from the previous job and heard they are looking for a junior developer in their company. I got the interview: live coding, coding exercise for a couple of days, and BOOM! 💣

I landed my first programming job.

I was a PHP junior developer. The salary was negligible, around €300 per month.

Anyway, I was happy. I haven't been looking at the watch, waiting when the working day is over for the first time in my life. I had a pretty good team-lead who educate me on a lot of stuff with patience.

Unfortunately, the management of the company wasn't great and we had a lot of problems with them. Eventually, most of the team quit their positions including me. That was my first and the only office job as a programmer and it lasted for a year.

After I quit even more interesting part of my story began. But I move it to the next post.

Beginner's note

I'd like to give some advice to people who only starting their career and journey. And also to think about what I would have done differently.

• Don't research too much. It's good to do some research on the paths of the career or where you need to start with your current knowledge. But don't put too much pressure on yourself. When you over-research you will start to listen to everyone and compare yourself to others. "This language is the best", "I'm working in Google", "I learned how to code for 2 months and I'm making a bunch load of money". All this has to be ignored. Every situation is different, every person has their own path. Take your time and comfortable pace.
• The best way to start thinking and learning to code is to focus on basics. Languages and technologies are great but they are constantly changing whereas the basics are not. Try to learn the core basics at first and move to the specifics after.
• Don't wait too long before you start looking for your first job. You'll never be the ideal hacker you're imagining in your head. The job requirements also could look very scary at first but then you will learn they are not mandatory. The companies are often overstating the requirements in the job listings.
• When you start to go deeper in learning specific technologies try to cover the related fields. If you're back-end developer learn DB, Servers, Operation Systems. If you chose the front-end development learn HTML/CSS, how browsers work, design basic. It will T-shape you and make you a better specialist.
• Make sure you're also paying attention to the environment you work in. It's related to the things which make developer's lives easier. Things like version control systems, Continuous Integration/Delivery, monitoring tools, even editors or IDEs.
• Soft skills are very important for programmers. Learn to talk/write/communicate.
• Find the community where you feel comfortable and learn together with others. It helped me a lot on my path. Without community, you sometimes can feel you're drawing in all this information. With the community, your peers always have your back.
• Code, code, code, especially at the beginning. Nothing makes you better programmer then solving the real issues.

And the most important thing that has nothing to do with programming - never stop looking for yourself, believe me, it is worth finding.

If you want to discuss my article or share your challenges as a junior developer tweet me at @dpashutskii

But I decided it should change this year. I set the goal at the beginning of the year to develop and launch at least 2 projects. And here it goes. After 3 months I launch my first project Arcade Hub.

I hope my story encourages some of you who also want to have a side project but continuously postponing the first step.

💡 Idea

I decided not to think too much about the idea because it's probably one of the reasons I haven't done it in the past. So I just started to notifying the problems I experienced and the moments "I wish I had this..." and write it down to the Notion.

At the moment of the start, I just looked at my notes and picked the easiest and fun. In my case, it was a service that supports Apple Arcade users.

Apple Arcade is the service by Apple which costs around 5$ per month and you get access to 100+ library of games (mostly arcades) without ads or any internal monetization. So it's game subscription service for all Apple devices.

After the launch, I tried the service and I liked it. But there was one problem, I didn't know how to pick a good game. They have reviews and scores as any app in AppStore, but it's inconvenient to check every game. That's what I decided to fix.

👨‍💻 Implementation

I love to learn new stuff so I decided to pick technologies that I never used or used not much before. It was Node.js, React.js, GraphQL powered by Apollo client and server, MongoDB.

I think here I made a mistake. The one thing is to do the project for learning and completely another doing project with goals to launch it for the public and have real users. The most important goal was finishing the project, get this closure feeling. But with learning new technologies, it could never happen.

It was a mistake, but that's what the first projects are for. To learn on our mistakes. Eventually, I stuck with a couple of problems because of the lack of experience, but with the Internet, everything could be solved, right? However, I decided my next project going to be on the familiar stack.

Especially if this is your first side project which you want to finish and maintain further I recommend you to chose your working stack.

👩‍🎨 Design

On that topic, I was just lucky that my wife is starting to learn design. So we decided this project going to be an experiment for her as well and she can practice web design.

If you don't know any designers I'd recommend using Figma and/or design systems. Even that I had designs, out of the box components allowed me to go much faster with elements. Otherwise, I need to implement a lot of CSS for that. And I'm not a big fan of CSS, to be honest.

Depending on your stack but TailwindCSS is a very good solution especially with the amount of ready components on the web. Design systems could be also very helpful. I used https://ant.design/ for React, but it could be anything. I heard a lot of good stuff about material design and you can find the components for any framework.

🚀 Launch

I finally finished and launched it, what's now?

Since it was a test project and I wanted to learn on my mistakes so I decided to try marketing as well. I know nothing on that topic, so I went through the pretty standard process that I've seen in makers communities: Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, and a little bit on IndieHackers and Makerlog. My hopes were on PH and Reddit, gaming projects seem not so popular on PH, but Reddit fits perfectly.

I found the niche community for the project (/r/AppleArcade) and post about my project. For such a small community I got around 75 votes which were one of the most popular topics on this subreddit. And most importantly I got my first traffic and amazing feedback. People find my project very simple and I thought it's going to be a downside of it but everyone prises how simple it is. Probably people tired of complex web-apps doing everything and my one-purpose app turns out very refreshing. That was insightful. I also got a lot of ideas on how to expand the project further.

I got around 1000 unique visitors during the two days of launch according to SimpleAnalytics and it's no big numbers overall but for me it was amazing. The feeling that you've done something helpful even for a few people is very inspiring!

Also, one of the Hungarian online magazines (they write about Apple stuff) found my post on Reddit and published the article about the project. It was beyond my expectations.

⚙️ Maintaining

From the start, I planned this project should be completely free and the main purpose is to have fun and learn something about launching products. But just in case I've created the buymeacoffee page and put it to the "About" section of the app.

I was really surprised when after a few weeks I got my first €5 subscriber. I didn't expect it at all. It turns out it was one of the developers of Apple Arcade games and he finds my site very helpful and he used it for some internal analytics. I suggested implementing API to easier get the data from my website and he was really happy. That's another cool thing about publishing your projects - you never expect how it turns out. A lot of successful startups did several pivots before they found their purpose.

A bit later I got positive feedback from one more developer of Apple Arcade games.

In terms of maintaining I'm having fun as well. I finally have the place where I can experiment and apply something I recently learned in the area of programming or something else.

✅ Summary

I think every developer should at least once try to build the side project. It's very fun, encouraging, and inspiring to do so.

You shouldn't try to build a multimillion startup or trying to create the best product ever. In the beginning, you should just try to satisfy one user - yourself. And don't worry about all these successful projects people launching. Behind each successful project a lot of work and sweat. First off try to have fun and then you decide if you want to tie yourself out with making.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always willing to help!

PS. I'm now building my second project and it's about learning in public. I'm starting MVP with the purpose of learning programming. I want to expand the ideas of 100DaysOfCode and similar ones and present a good platform for learning in public and build a good community.

Very excited to present it in the future!

But also here a lot of entrepreneurs. Most of them are starting small businesses (1-3 persons) and trying to become successful. Recently I started curios about this more so I decided to create a post.

For the last decade, our approach to work is changed. Everybody is talking about how remote work conquers the world. But how we do business is changing as well. If you have coding/designing skill it's becoming even easier. A big chunk of the products I've seen here is web/mobile services because they are faster to bootstrap and the potential audience is enormous.

To start your own project these are only requirements you have: idea, time, hosting/server costs, online marketing costs. That's it. Compared to offline businesses it sounds like a dream doesn't it? There is even a term for it - Indie making. You are completely independent of any of the big business ties. And it gives you flexibility and enjoyment.

Here in Bali, people have a very different starting point. Someone saved the money beforehand and move in cheap South-Eastern Asia, someone is still working part-time (like me) and trying to work it out in free time.

A lot of these new wave startups also trying to spread the word about very important ideas: sustainability, open startup movement, data privacy, transparency. Which is amazing.

Since this "making" thing is becoming more popular there are a lot of great communities to help you on the way to achieve your goals.

If you want to give it a shot here are a couple of links:

• https://www.indiehackers.com - one of the most popular communities. You can find amazing people to communicate with and any help you need. In addition, they have a great feature to add your products and share the milestones with others.
• https://getmakerlog.com - a very cool community with the main idea of public making. You have public to-do's with streaks which helps to maintain your stability of making. I discovered it recently and love the idea! And they have a very supportive telegram chat.
• https://wip.chat/ - similar to the previous one but with the subscription.
• https://www.producthunt.com/ - one of the most popular websites about new products on the market. And not necessarily the indie ones.
• https://womenmake.com/ - community for women makers. As I heard it's very supportive and you can find fellow entrepreneurs to share your goals with.

And for sure Twitter. Many great and creative people to follow there. Some of them did a good job of promoting the whole movement:

• Pieter Levels - creator of nomadlist.com. You should just check the profit of his product to understand the influence.
• John O'Nolan - creator of the Ghost publishing platform and very experienced nomad.
• Ryan Hoover - creator of producthunt.com and recently published in beta amazing https://yourstack.com.
• Fajar Siddiq - serial creator, nomad, influencer, etc, etc. A great example of how much one person can achieve.
• Marc Köhlbrugge - creator of https://wip.chat/ and other great products.

And many many more!

Recently I also started working on a very small project which I use to learn and make mistakes. I don't have plans to earn money on it. After finishing it I have another idea which I want to implement to create a monetized product.

If you're into coding/design and you like to create new stuff or maybe you always wanted to try I would like to encourage you to start today.

For picking up the idea you can think about the problems you faced recently. And then try to solve it. The best client you can have at the beginning is yourself.

If you want to chat with me about nomading, making, coding and any other stuff feel free to reach me on twitter.

Let's make! 🎉

So this year I decided to do the same thing for 2019. Let's go!

💪 General

Last year was about new things, I started a lot of new challenges in my life so I decided to spend this year more with securing the results.

🏃 Health:

🧘‍♂️ Meditation: Last year I tried to make meditation a habit, but it was not so consistent as I planned. So this year my main goal is to keep it as steady as possible. Right now I'm doing 13 minutes every day (usually in the morning) so the main goal is to do it every morning.

🏃 Physical activity: This one is hard since we travel full time and staying in one place one month in the longest case. I'll try to find at least one physical activity at each place and stick to it. For example, when we were close to the ocean on Bali I've been surfing a lot. Now we are at the center of the island and we do Yoga classes (which is awesome by the way). Next place is Malaysia and we will go to the gym there etc.

🍲 Food: I wasn't eating meat during the last year, but I have to eat seafood sometimes. Basically, the plan is the same. Stick to vegetarian food as much as I can.

🥂 Alcohol: I realized that alcohol and parties coincide with traveling pretty bad. At the end of the year, we almost completely deleted liqueurs from our routine. This year I decided to cancel beer and other related products as well. We also don't have access to wine here in Asia so basically, we don't drink at all which is great. I would do an exception to this rule only when we travel to wine countries (Spain, Italy, France etc.) to taste some good wines. And I don't have plans to back to beer or liquors.

📚 Education and brain food:

👨‍💻 Programming: I have so many cards in my Trello board related to new things and technologies I wanna learn in the Software Engineering area, but I decided there is no space in this year for that. I'm gonna stick to a few areas which I use in everyday life and for work and dig deeper in that: ReactJS (and JS in general), RubyOnRails (and Ruby itself) and very related things like Webpack, GraphQL, CSS/HTML things etc. If I can I'll also include the Computer Science to that, but I'm not sure. I still have SICP and Grokking Algorithms to read, but only if I get free time, which I'm not sure of.

🎓 University: I still in the middle of my Computer Engineering degree at Marconi University. I study online and in May 2020 I have to go to Rome to get the diploma. It takes a lot of time to study there, but still not as much as if I studied at not-online University. So keep going here and at the end of this year, I need to pass 12 more exams to pass the schedule.

🌐 Language: Last year I spent a lot of time improving my English level. This year I don't have plans to improve English on purpose, but I use this every day so I think it would get better anyway. But I started to learn new language, it's German. I started with zero knowledge so I don't have big plans to achieve a great level this year and I don't rush it. The main goal is to learn it every day (I have babbel subscription and my words app which I love very much and it helps me a lot with English) for 20-30 minutes. One day I learn grammar, the other one I study words and stick to this. With this approach I'm gonna reach A2 level at the end of the year I suppose.

📘 Books: As usual, I participate in Reading Challenge 2019 on Goodreads (20 books is the goal). My main purpose of this year to read in English all books unless I have copy in Russian.

💡 Project(-s):

🧳 Travel content: Our travel lives lead us (Me and my wife) to create content about it, so right now it's the main project I have. In particular it's YouTube channel and Instagram account. We don't have a huge success with it so far, but we just started with zero knowledge to any of that so I think it's alright. During the year I wanna improve my knowledge about filmmaking and video editing. And also about photography (theory, equipment, practice parts). I have plans to improve the equipment as well. At least to buy a new camera (perhaps a mirrorless one). We also gonna launch our site in a few months which will be kinda portfolio + blog. So We're gonna work on that as well. In addition, it would be great to improve marketing skills at least a little to know how to promote your content. We're not waiting for any money from that project, we just like to do that.

✈️ Travel: I consider this part of my life as project as well and thread it like a project. In terms of planning, success measuring etc. Right now we already have strong plans (tickets and accommodation) about the next destination. We going to Penang island in Malaysia on the 6th of February. And some approximate plans in terms of countries we want to visit until May (Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand).

✍️ Blogs: I had a plan to write more in the last year but couldn't manage it well. So this year I'm really into it. Not sure about the topics, maybe I concentrate on travel blog or current blog, but the goal is to write more.

⁉️Other projects: I have several ideas in mind to implement in the coming years. It could lead to business or just side projects depending on how it goes. In thise projects, I also could improve my knowledge of technologies which I listed above. But I don't have to rush it, so I also don't set the goals in this area, but it would be great to publish live at least one project this year.

💰 Finance

My wife and I have huge plans for the year 2020 and for that we need to start saving money now. We already started to analyze our spendings and cut the things which we really don't need (alcohol is one of them as well). Approximate goal to save $7000 by the end of the year. If we take into account that we travel full-time and it costs money I think it would be a great result. In terms of work, I have no plans to change something. Maybe we gonna start taking more work projects to to achieve that goal, we'll see.

That's it. Will do a review at the end of the year. If you have any thoughts, suggestions, questions or you just wanna chat you can reach me on Twitter

😎 General

First of all this year was awesome! I completely changed my life, my work approach, the way how I see a lot of things, got married and went to the biggest travel adventure of my life.

This goal setup helped me so much. The whole year I had a mindset where am I going and why I'm doing each small thing. I have a Trello board with four columns: "Backlog", "To do (within this particular month)", "In progress" and "Done" and a repeatable card with everyday stuff (about 4-5 things). Everything there are small things that need to be done. All stuff I've created this year were directed to achieve global goals. So I'll definitely set up goals for 2019 as well.

Let's look at the details.

💰 Get a Stable Income From a Freelance — Done.

This one I'm satisfied completely with. I have a few clients which I work for my whole time and I don't have to spend time on searching new contracts like a lot of freelancers do. Basically, I have a part-time job and make as much money as I want depending on how many hours I spend on it. My working hours are flexible and I like what I do.

At this point, I only can become a better specialist and get a higher hourly rate. In other ways everything is perfect. So 100% of success on this goal.

🧳 Go On A Long Journey Around The World — Done.

We went on this journey at 3rd of September and still on it. I'm writing this post from Bali and it's so awesome! I realized the traveling is my passion a few years ago and from that point, I went to this goal (to travel full time) and finally made it.

Right now we travel with my wife around East Southern Asia, we visited 17 cities and 10 countries for less than half a year and became even more hungry for travel than we were. We have so many ideas and plans for 2019 destinations. Also, we have a huge plan for the 2020 year, and it's so exciting for me, but it's only in development so we'll get back to that at the end of 2019 :)

We also wanted to have some kind of travel journal and we experimented with a lot of platforms and ended up with two:

• Our Youtube channel - we upload twice per week (Monday and Friday), so if you interested how our travel journey goes, subscribe! This is also lead me to learn new things like editing, filming and YouTube-ing in general which is great because I love to learn new things, especially outside of IT area.
• Our Instagram - where we post a lot of photos from our journey and sometimes stories. Instagram is an amazing platform where you can express yourself. It's already gone beyond food and girlish photos. You basically can create an account for any kind of creativity you do and share with the world.
• In addition, we have a plan to start out website/blog very soon.

100% to this goal as well!

🍅 Don’t Eat A Meat/Fish In This Year — Success Level 70%.

This goal is very important to me and for the way what kind of person I see I wanna be in the future and what global goals I wanna reach. Recently I realize that sustainability, environment, nature, and the world itself are not an empty sound for me and I want to do as much as possible to help become world the better place. Or at least not spoil it for next generations.

Do not eat meat was my first goal, but while we travel around Thailand I got that I need to find a compromise or I'll starve to death :D. So I decided when I can't find vegetarian food I'll be eating fish or seafood. I've not a big fan of seafood so usually, I just eat something like fish and chips or fish nugget.

So goal not completely succeeds, but I'm still on my way and when I'm in places where I can find decent vegetarian food I'll only eat that.

If summarise I didn't eat meat/fish till September (so 9 months) and then sometimes I ate fish and it's not hurt me at all. I get enough vitamins and minerals, so why do we eat animals at all? This question I can't answer.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Improve My English To Upper-Intermediate Level — Done.

It's hard to measure your level of language if be honest. A lot of different sources could give you different answers. I measured it by my satisfaction.

I'm really happy with my level of English right now. I have a lot of conversations with people in English and it's never a problem to understand or express my thoughts. Moreover, our YouTube channel in English which helps a lot.

I can write in English, although I do a lot of mistakes probably and still use only a few tenses, it's only a matter of experience. I read books, watch movies and TV shows, play games in English. So now I'll move my learning path to practice path. I use English every day for basically everything so it'll become better and better. 100% success here.

👨‍💻 Finish #100DaysOfCode And Coding Courses — Done.

That goal I've already reached in my half-year review so nothing to add here.

I want to change approach here similar to English. I want more make stuff and less learn (in the usual way like courses) because from some level I think it's much more effective.

🏃 Continue Running And Start Working Out In A Gym — Success 50%

Yeah, here we are :) Health goals are not so successful this year. Running and working out are hard things to do while you travel. Or it's just an excuse for laziness :)

I'm trying to add physical activity as much as possible. Sometimes we rent accommodation with a gym or at least with a treadmill which helps a lot. Here in Bali, I surf as much as possible. Our next place will do Yoga lessons so I'll try that as well.

So basically I have physical activity, but it's maybe not so consistent as I want. So I give this goal 50%.

By the way I completely in love with surfing. Its so much fun to slide the wave especially when you can stand up on board :D I feel I'm becoming much better in it, I manage to turn and conquer real waves and not only a foam. But there is still so much practice I need.

🧘‍♂️ Continue Meditating On A Daily Basis — Success 36%

It funny, but when I review this goal in my half-year review I counted my meditation days and it was 36% of the whole days. Today I did the same thing and it's exactly 100 meditate session within 365 days which is 36.5% of the year. So I'm pretty consistent here :D.

Of course, it's a pretty bad result for me because I'm really enjoying meditation and it helps me to be calmer during the day and focus better on stuff. But constancy is my problem. This goal I move to the 2019 year and I hope will be more successful there.

🧘‍♂️ Start to write more on the blog — Failed.

When I write my explorations of goals at the half of the year I completely forgot this goal. This is the only one I marked as a failure because I haven't posted anything on a blog at all.

This year I started with moving my two blogs (Russian and this one) to GatsbyJS site generator based on ReactJS. I also used Contentful as content storage and Netlify for deploying. I turned off my server where I hold Ghost blog engine and very happy about it. Generated static content so much faster and React gives me all stuff to customize my blog. And also it's free because I host everything on Github.

In addition, we're planning to start travel blog so I hope this year will be the more blogging year for me than 2018.

📚 The Additional Challenge Which I Participate In Every Year Is Goodreads Reading Challenge — Done.

As in previous years, I achieved my goal here. That's my list of books I've read in this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/10599444. 25 of 20 which is even more than I planned. A few of them were comic books so we're square here :)

I love to read very much, but next year I have an additional challenge here cause I want to read only in English. I've already started my first book and this is "Game of Thrones". I think I'm the last one who hasn't read that Martin's series on the planet.

So that's it for my summary. I totally enjoyed this year and I'm very satisfied with my results.

Really appreciate that you’ve read this.

https://twitter.com/year_progress/status/1013754160456650752

So, halfway there, right? I really didn’t notice how this half-year passed. Actually, there is more already. I was planning to write it down for too long. At the beginning of the year, I made a statement on Twitter with my goals for 2018 year. Here it is:

https://x.com/dpashutskii/status/948059634245488645

I was thinking about posting my half-years review for a month, but then I saw the post from Joe Previte and that inspired me to do it. Let’s see.

Get a stable income from a freelance — Success level 80%.

I started working on a Freelance platform https://upwork.com in January this year. The main reason for that was the independence from working hours and days. I can work wherever I want and with whom I want.

Surely, it has a lot of cons as well. You have to find clients by yourself and even with the platform help it still hard to do. Amount of freelancers is times bigger that amount of customers. First two months where really hard when you are trying to improve your portfolio and customer base. Eventually I found a few great customers and work with them on a long-term basis. These relationships are pretty stable, but still I can improve a lot.

First of all, I can start by increasing my hourly rate, it’ll give me even more stability. Besides I really want to find a long-term client with React, because I like this lib a lot, so it would be great to work with it on a daily basis.

In case someone is interested my profile is here.

Go on a long journey around the world (beginning approximately in the fall) — Success level 50%.

This one I am very excited about. This event already has a determined date (3.09.2018). I booked all the flights and accommodations. So it’s just a matter of time now.

My first path will be: Saint-Petersburg ✈️ Hua-Hin (7d.) ✈️ Bangkok (7d.) ✈️ Chiang Mai (1.5m) ✈️ Kuala Lumpur (3d.) ✈️ Bali (3+m.).

I only booked a few weeks on Bali so I’ll look for a house when I am on the island. I plan to spend the whole winter there, travel around Asia and go to Europe for three months when Spring comes. In addition, I travel this summer. I visited Kaliningrad /Budapest 🇭🇺/Belgrade 🇷🇸/Novi-Sad 🇷🇸 and I am going to visit Napoli 🇮🇹🍕/Milan 🇮🇹/Budapest 🇭🇺 again (One of the best cities I’ve ever been)/Debrecen 🇭🇺 in August.

Don’t eat a meat/fish in this year — Success level 99,9%.

This one goes unexpectedly easily and smoothly. Before I decided not to eat meat I read about it on the Internet and some people said that you could be experiencing discomfort or you want meat all the time. I can say it is not true for me.

I just stopped eating meat 1 Jan 2018 and It went so naturally. Frankly speaking this decision has already made a good effect on my health. I feel better every day. It’s a bit harder to look for places to eat, especially in countries where vegetarianism is not so popular. But it’s not too hard in general.

So why 99.9%? Some guy from KFC gave me Chicken Twister instead of Veggie 😆🥦. I don’t blame him, the work at fast food looks really exhausting, but anyway I was a bit upset 🙃

I’m not gonna eat meat/fish in the future as well.

Improve my English to Upper-Intermediate level — Success 40%

It’s the toughest one. I almost switched all my life (except every day talking) to English, but it still hard. I have a lot of issues with the grammar, but I feel some improvements anyway. I hope progress will be going faster when I am going to live as an expat in non-Russian speaking countries.

I also have a really great teacher on the English learning platform who helps me a lot with my issues. I have a weekly meeting with him and homework.

Finish #100DaysOfCode and coding courses — Success 100%

I finished all courses that I planned at the begging of the year and finished my commitment to #100DaysOfCode.

https://x.com/dpashutskii/status/981242389267468289

I still learn a lot though. I start new courses, read programming books and try to involve myself in the communities which usually really helpful. I really like two of them — https://dev.to and https://forum.freecodecamp.org. And twitter of course.

Btw, dev.to started a really great mentorship program a few days ago which I joined as a Frontend mentor and as a Ruby/RoR mentee. Yes, you can be both, cool, right?

Also related to this I wanna force myself to spend a bit more time to be in the community. For me, the best way to learn new things is talking to people, when you help them and they help you.

In addition, I study in the Online University. Honestly, I already have a few debts but I continue to learn new interesting stuff. I discovered https://www.khanacademy.org/ which is really helpful for me.

Continue running and start working out in a gym — Success 50%

I really like running. And really don’t like gyms 😔 These feelings lead me to result in this goal.

I went to a gym for a month three days a week and then I stopped. It takes a lot of time because the gym is too far from my home. But when I stopped I started running more which is really satisfy me.

Current year stats from Runkeeper:

I’m gonna continue to running and it’ll be great to beat my personal 10km record this summer. I don’t plan to participate in any competition, just with myself.

Continue meditating on a daily basis — Success 36%

I truly like to meditate, but it’s really hard for me to make something a daily habit.

I meditated this year about 72 times (due 201 days) which is approximate ~720 minutes.

Sadly, but in Health you can’t check overall amount of minutes:

I tried several apps for meditation (Calm, Headspace, 10% Happier). Eventually, I chose Insight Timer (thanks Joe for the suggestion and great advices) and it’s pretty great for me. It’s like open source in Meditation. Other apps more like products by subscription, but this one has a lot of community content, I love this way more.

Nothing changing here, I’ll trying to make it daily habit.

The additional challenge which I participate in every year is Goodreads reading challenge — Success 100%

Here everything goes according to the plan. I read 10/20 books so far and pretty close to finishing another one. My progress on Goodreads.

PS Saga is amazing by the way

Yeah, I know, the three of them are just comic books, but it counts! 😁 Besides, two of them are pretty big comic books.

That’s it for now, I’ll come back at the end of the year to sum up the whole thing and made new goals.

Really appreciate that you’ve read this.