I arrived in New Zealand mid-February and while I’ve started purchasing a few items, I was excited to pare down the stuff in my life when I was packing up in the USA. My closet was full of clothes I no longer wore and there were boxes in the garage of things I hadn’t touched since moving into that home. It was the perfect time to de-clutter.

As I thought about what to take, my determining factor was a little mental algorithm I stepped through that compared an item’s weight and size to its cost and ability to be procured in New Zealand. My sleeping bag may have taken up a good portion of my suitcase, but it was worth bringing since it is expensive enough to not want to buy a new one here in New Zealand. I’m not planning to country hop every month or two, so I was able to bring a bit more. Here is what I decided to take:

• Everyday clothes, but only a few sets
• Some dressier clothes, but only ones I’d worn recently
• Ultimate frisbee jerseys and gear, but again, just the basics (this is my biggest activity aside from work so it warrants its own category)
• Business gear such as laptop and accessories
• A few hobby items (not essential, but my bags ended up underweight)

What about everything else that doesn’t make the cut? There’s more to it than just throwing a couple pairs of clothes and a laptop in your bag. Will you be storing the stuff you can’t take with you? If so, will it be with friends, family, or in a storage facility? Maybe you’ll decide to sell or donate some of your things.

Lastly, get a friend to help you. Not only should you be hanging out with people you won’t be seeing for a while, but having someone else around while you pack and purge can be highly motivating. They can also help you decide that, yes, it’s okay to throw out things you haven’t used in two years.

As a final thought, I’ve always thought the fact that we have to use the words “stuff” and “things” when talking about our possessions is indicative of how important they really are. This may be something to keep in mind as you start writing up your own packing list. If you’re in a privileged enough position where you can take the leap into this nomadic lifestyle, I would recommend getting rid of most anything that doesn’t hold sentimental value. Consider how each item lines up with your values.

Personally, the less cluttered my spaces are, digital or physical, the more mental clarity I have. Just like closing Twitter and email can help you focus on your work, removing physical distractions can bring focus to your travel, making it both easier to get around and allowing you to be fully immersed with the real reasons for being a digital nomad: exciting new places, experiences, and people.

I’ve been thinking about MVP and recently read an article about that dubious term. “MVP” gets batted around in product teams and start-ups trying to adhere to the Agile development methodology. It means just what it sounds like: do the least amount possible of work to make your product and ship it. Because ship it! Ship it! Ship it! And while I agree that getting your project out the door right away is important, the problem is that by focusing too much on “minimum” is a lack of focus on what the actual end result was supposed to be in the first place. One of my favorite points in that article is to not forget the word “viable.”

[Y]our Minimum Viable Product should provide one COMPLETE FOCUSED EXPERIENCE to your early adopters.

To go along with that is a great image from the Spotify team:

That is why I’m calling my work right now a proof of concept. The code and the current result both are not viable. But now I need to hone in on what is viable. I have all these ideas of what I want to do with this side project, but I should focus in on what is important first. The bare minimum, done very well. I need to make the one core function work and work well in a way that I can build upon. Not a couple of important pieces sort of work.

From the motivation standpoint, I’ve had to be really good about getting a daily task list written down each day to tackle each little piece. Even if a piece is simply “port the temp JSON structure to a database table.” Anything else right now for me is just flailing.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole late last week learning some new ways for me to streamline my project production path. It was great because it will make all my work for clients in the future much easier to manage. Once those processes were in place, I had to rein myself back in from doing all the other cool automation stuff I was brainstorming because they aren’t important yet.

I feel like now that I have something to work with things will pick up a bit more in the motivation department. I can feel a good groove coming on, now that I’m adjusting from taking most of the summer off.

(By the way, I currently have openings if you’re looking for someone to create a website for you, or if you need a front-end developer to work with.)

Here I am now, a few weeks later, finishing up the major work on my last freelance job before my full time in-house one begins.

After going through interviews and meeting with several people in the company, I decided to accept their offer of employment. WebTrends really seems to be a fantastic place to work. When I hear employees say that what draws them back is the people they work with and the culture of the company, it makes me stop and consider. That’s a place I want to work: not only where the company takes care of its employees, but where the employees build real friendships with each other and are more than coworkers.

I’m not finished with freelance though. Of course I’ll always have my own little projects going on behind the scenes. In addition, I plan on taking a few select clients. Sure, time will be limited, but because of that and the fact that I’ll have a steady paycheck I can be very selective with the projects I choose. This means I can work only on jobs I really believe in which means I’ll be motivated to put in my best work which in turn means the client gets the best results as well! (So hey, if you have a rockin’ project, let me know and maybe we can work together).

So Monday things will be quite different, and I’m excited for that change!

<svg width="100" height="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
 <!-- Created with SVG-edit - http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/ -->
 <g>
  <title>Layer 1</title>
  <rect id="svg_1" height="50" width="100" y="0" x="0" fill="#FF0000"/>
  <rect fill="#00FF00" x="0" y="50" width="100" height="50" id="svg_2"/>
 </g>
</svg>

(Note the comment in there, I used that editor to generate the code. It looks like a great learning tool! Check it out.)

Here’s a live version of that code.

This is what you should see if your browser can display SVG.

Shush. Don’t judge my color choices.

Now, since that’s just code it’s really easy to swap out of the colors depending on your needs. Especially with a little bit of PHP in there. I grab my colors out of a database, but they could just as easily be in an array. For example:

<?php
header("Content-type: image/svg+xml");
$colors = array('#ff0000', '#00ff00');
?>

<svg width="100" height="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
 <!-- Created with SVG-edit - http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/ -->
 <g>
  <title>Layer 1</title>
  <rect id="svg_1" height="50" width="100" y="0" x="0" fill="<?php echo $colors[0] ?>"/>
  <rect fill="<?php echo $colors[1] ?>" x="0" y="50" width="100" height="50" id="svg_2"/>
 </g>
</svg>

Save that as a .php file and you’re good to go. It’s important to notice the content-type being set by the header() function. This makes sure the browser treats the output as SVG.

Lastly, in my CSS file I simply set the above PHP file as the source for my background: url().

.stripes {
    background: url(your-php-generated-svg.php);
}

That will repeat across the x- and y-axes. You could also use background-size to change the size since it’s a scalable vector.

Don’t forget to know when you can use it!

Update 22-Feb-2012:
I just stumbled across this CSS declaration today: repeating-linear-gradient Looks like that might be problem solved!