Steve Leaves Tug

My Travel Blog

Hello! Steven White here - taking a six month break from real life to check out the world. I'll be spending 3 months in Asia, and 3 months in South America, before going back to work at Redfin. I'll be using this blog to both describe my travels, as well as my work building out more features in this blog.

Blog Entry 0

4/11

Hello! Welcome to my blog. If you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to know what the name of the blog means, and the context for it. I'm taking off for about 6 months, leaving Tug at home (my dog), and backpacking around Asia and South America.

This blog will serve a couple purposes:

I am really bad at updating facebook - having this will force me to give updates - and I promise at least 1 / week, whenever I have internet.

I am a software developer. I don't want to forget how to do my day job over the next 6 months. While that's a bit of a stretch, it's been fun playing with some new technologies building this blog from scratch. I'll write a blog post about the details of that later, however it is an Express Node application, running on Elastic Beanstalk, backed by a mysql RDS DB. Translation for non-tech friends: It's running in the cloud.

Throughout the trip, whenever I get tired of running around all day, I'll plan on going to a local coffee shop to either add a new feature, or write a new post.

A brief overview of my plans are to spend about 10 weeks in Asia, head back to Seattle for a couple weeks around June 25th (flight to be purchased at some point in the future), then head down to South America on July 7th, back to Seattle on October 5th. For Asia, I'm currently on a flight to India, then will be going to Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, and no plans after that.

To wrap up this first post, just want to say thanks to a few people who, without their help, this trip would have either not happened, or would have been a much bigger hassle. First off (and probably most importantly), to the people who are watching Tug - Alyssa, Jen, Megan and Max. My parents for giving me the travel itch when growing up. All the random people who I'm meeting along the way. Anna/Jenny for my fantastic care package before leaving, and organizing the going away party. Tom, for giving us all an excuse to go to Austin to kick off this trip. And lastly, everybody at Redfin who is letting me come back after the end of the trip - Gordon, Bridget especially.

Next post: 1st Stop, Austin Texas.