benny: my first blog post in a year and a half

"If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead

Hi. Long time no talk. I missed writing.

If you're new here: I'm Benny. I am a self-taught freelance software engineer and digital nomad. I'm currently traveling the world and working remotely.

Life’s been busy. Been trying to get my mistakes out early 🙂

This post is around 4300 words. If that’s a bit long, feel free to browse the TooLong;Didn’tRead below.

Thanks for being here!

TL;DR:
- Since my last post, I found multiple new clients and completed projects with them, which gave me the finances for all of 2024 & 2025
- I had a Singaporean intern, I saw orangutans in Borneo, scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef with 10 friends from the US, hiked the Great Wall of China with my brother, and got my advanced scuba certification
- Stayed in a cabin in Okinawa, Japan with the close friends from Bali and worked remotely for 1 month. Saw Nintendo Land, ate “homemade” sashimi daily
- Hosted both of my brothers and a few close friends from university in Bali. Some of these trips went well, others were a series of L’s. Won’t say which is which ;)
- Came back to the US after ~2 years of not seeing my parents and friends, got laser eye surgery, and stayed for a few weeks in NYC and Florida with friends
- Ran an email marketing experiment, managed to get a lot of warm leads and sign a new client. Moderate success, wrote a guide, have ideas on how to improve
- Went to Tashkent, Uzbekistan with parents and brothers. My parents’ first time back in over 30 years - very special trip to see where and how they grew up
- Then continued on to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. Now in China gearing up to travel remote parts of Western China. Working on creative pursuits 🧑‍🎨
- Travels will continue after an intermission in the US. After that: South Asia for a while
- I talked about what I’ll do next, including the “why” behind my decisions. Read below for more!! 👇

Pt. 1: What has happened since my last post

My last blog post: an update on my bali and coding journey (Feb 4, 2024)

It’s been a wild year and a half. Not sure how to even recount all of this, so I’ll start with some quick stats:

• Days since last post: 583
• Stomach bugs: 5
• New countries: 8
• Laser Eye surgeries: 1
• Interns employed: 1
• New & existing software engineering clients: 4
• Web apps worked on or deployed: 10
• Cm gained on arms: 7
• 2024 workout sessions: 125
• Beards grown: 2
• Advanced scuba certifications received: 1
• Brothers hosted in Bali: 2
• US/UK Friends hosted in Bali: 5
• Months of runway gained from savings: 18
• Products publicly launched: 1 (boo launch more)
• Manual motorbike certifications: 1 (informal)
• Days on horseback: 4
• Orangutans seen: 12 (estimate)
• Giant Pandas seen: 20 (estimate)
• Homelands visited: 1
• Tennis tournaments won: 1
• Tennis tournaments lost: 2
• Scubas dived: 8
• Marathons run: 0 (Singapore 2023 was enough)

I spent most of 2024 in Bali. It was a beautiful time. I know there are many people with lots of complaints about Bali, and those complaints are probably valid. But I found it to be an amazing place that had everything I wanted for this phase of my life: community with good people, great weather with lots of sun, all the activities I enjoy doing, affordable cost of living, adventure, and good workspaces.

Incoming: a lot of pictures.

It was so good that I ended up indexing more towards enjoyment and travel and less on “productivity”. I have mixed feelings about this though. I address this more in part 2 below.

There is so much I could say about my time there, but suffice it to say that I think I got to experience the best of both worlds: diving into my work while enjoying the beauty of life on an island with a unique, kind, welcoming culture. I ate healthy food, worked out often, worked out of a beautiful coworking space, played tennis, scuba dived, went waterfall chasing, partied, stayed in amazing villas, surfed (rarely, but sometimes), walked on the beach, dated, traveled to other islands and countries, made new friends (locals and “bule” - foreigners), and continued learning how to be a better software engineer. I even picked up a bit of the Indonesian language: Bahasa Indonesia.

I had an intern from Singapore come visit me in Bali and work on my chess project that Logan and I started back in late 2023 together, which with the help of the intern, turned into www.chessis.fun 🙂.

The adventures continued:

I scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia with 10 friends from university (most of whom flew in from the US!). I did a night dive and swam with sharks, which made me feel like I was a Navy Seal 🦭.

I saw orangutans in Borneo with 12 friends from Bali.

I got my advanced scuba certification in Amed, my favorite part of Bali (it’s a small beach town nestled between some of the best scuba diving on the island, and the island’s highest peak, Mount Agung).

I won a doubles tennis tournament with my friend Johan 🎾.

I visited my younger brother in China. We partied with his friends in Shanghai, then went to Beijing and hiked the Great Wall. Then we went to South Korea. We partied there too, and a very stylish friend from Bali, now living in Seoul, gave my brother a fashion makeover 🙂

I lived in Okinawa, Japan for a month with friends from Bali. We stayed in an amazing log cabin and worked remotely together. We ate “homemade” sashimi daily, traveled around the island, including to the “Blue Zone” at the north end (one of the rare places where people consistently live past 100). We island hopped and went to Zamami island, a tiny island where I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen and got to experience a local Japanese festival, which was incredible. Before Okinawa, we stopped by Nintendo Land in Osaka, and spent a day temple hopping in Kyoto.

I hosted my brothers and close friends from university. We went around the island, scuba dived, stayed in fancy cabins, and more. My older brother spent a month with me in Bali and I got to share my home with him. We even rented a whole apartment building together (we were its last tenants, as it was getting demolished after).

Life was good. But a feeling kept growing inside me that this phase of my life needed to eventually end. So I left.

I went back home for the first time in years. I finally got to see my parents (I saw them in December 2024 for the first time since January 2023 - a few attempts had been made in between but the plans had fallen through. Bali is far from Texas).

I got laser eye surgery because I was tired of my glasses and went from nearly -5 in both eyes, to 25/20 vision (and somehow can now shoot lasers out of my eyes). I recovered and spent a month in Florida with digital nomad friends from Bali. I got to show a bunch of Europeans around the US. What a goofy experience, honestly. Unsolicited advice: avoid bringing Germans to Chipotle unless you want detailed analyses on portion sizes between restaurant locations.

Also Chipotle after 2 years of not having it is unreal. Maximum enjoyment.

I ran an email marketing experiment to find new clients, and after nearly 20,000 emails, managed to get decent number of warm leads + sign a new client. I called it a moderate success and wrote a guide about what I learned. Not sure if I’ll run another campaign soon, but I’ve got some ideas on how to improve on what I did.

I visited my favorite city in the world, NYC, and couch-surfed for a couple of weeks 🙂 (thank you Rohit, Nikitha, Dana, and Jeet!!).

Then I left the US again. I went to Tashkent, Uzbekistan with my parents and brothers. It was my parents’ first time back in over 30 years. This was incredibly special for all of us. My parents had the unique experience of showing their kids the place they grew up (a place we had never been to before). We got to see our parents react to seeing their childhood homes and schools again, and meeting old friends. I’ve never seen their eyes light up like that before. There is so much more I could say here as well. A post for another time.

I continued on to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. In Kyrgyzstan, I met up with two friends from Bali, Johan and Jard, and we went on a 4 day horse trekking trip. It was one of the toughest things I’ve done since my marathon. We trekked through massive elevation changes, snow, rain, sunburns, and more. We opened a snow pass that no one had been through yet that season - later on we met herders who were headed there to follow our tracks. On top of that, none of us had ridden horses before this for more than 30 minutes. But the honest truth was that we were total wimps compared to our guides, who did all of what we did plus setting up the campsites, feeding all of us and the horses, and taking care of problems as they came up. Shoutout Ruslan, Daneer, and Nur-beck.

I spent another week in Uzbekistan with a lovely person I met my first time there. I partied in the city with the somewhat underground cool Western-facing community of Uzbeks, and learned how to play the drums.

In Kazakhstan, I met a somewhat distant family member (to be exact, my 3rd cousin on my dad’s side) who is a professor at apparently the best university in Kazakhstan. I spent some time with his family, got sick with tonsillitis, then went to Mongolia. I took a 33 hour train from Urumqi, China to Ulanqab (Inner Mongolia, China), where I couldn’t get a bed, so I sat in a crowded room the entire time and ate instant noodles when I got hungry. Then, another 7 hour train, a border crossing into Mongolia, and another 17 hour Soviet-era sleeper train to the capital of Mongolia. In Mongolia, I saw Naadam (Mongolia’s annual festival) and went on a 9 day motorbiking trip with friends I met at a hostel there. I had never ridden a manual motorbike before, but trial by fire worked just fine 🙂

Now I’m back in China, headed to high altitudes. Which brings me to:

Pt. 2: What I’ll do next

This might become a travel blog 👀

I’ll get into that in a moment. But first, I want to share how I’m looking at my life right now.

I think it starts off with a central truth: I’m lucky. Most of that luck comes in the form of the following facts:

Those facts added up = a lot of freedom. When I stop to remember to think about these facts, it always feels like there answer to what I should be doing with my life is clear.

Plus, I’ve gotta remember what’s led me here. Mostly a combination of choices that I and others have made —

My choices:

• Studied physics in undergraduate to teach myself how to think through hard problems (which was helpful when learning to code), got a full scholarship + stipend which set me up well financially
• Worked for two years in jobs I wasn’t super happy with, but given they were high paying, was able to further solidify my financial freedom
• Exited corporate America to try to self-teach coding with the hope of freeing up my time and geographic freedom
• Went through breakup with ex-girlfriend, further freeing up my time and geographic freedom
• Moved to Bali on a spontaneous one-way ticket purchase, and after loving it, decided to stay to continue the dream lifestyle I was building for myself
• Self-taught software engineering, and through some luck and opportunity, found various software engineering clients

The choices of people around and before me:

• Mom & Dad left Uzbekistan as soon as they could, eventually making their way to Dallas, Texas to build their lives
• They lived in survival mode, working hard for decades to build a life of comfort and prosperity (which they hadn’t known in the first halves of their lives while growing up in the Soviet Union and throughout their journey of being refugees→immigrants), providing me and my brothers a safety net
• The survivors of my great-grandparents’ generation escaped the Holocaust, ending up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where they were safe from the War
• Their generation and the generation of my grandparents all educated themselves and worked hard in a society with a very low socioeconomic ceiling

[and many more choices beyond these]

The fact is, life tends to come in phases. If you’re lucky enough, you get to chose those phases. I’m lucky that the combinations of choices I enumerated above (and the swirling cloud of luck around them) have led to my life being as it is.

So I get to choose my next life phase. The one I’ve chosen is “get over my fears of putting myself out there on the internet, creating things that will be judged, and solo traveling” (probably need a better name for this phase).

But honestly, I’m still afraid of creating content and putting it out there. I gave myself excuses after moving to Bali about why I shouldn’t be doing it (”hard to balance with software engineering”). While there was some truth to those excuses, they weren’t the whole truth. And right now, with the amount of freedom over my time I have, the only remaining real excuse is that I’m afraid of judgement.

So to face my fears, I’m going to… face them. Some good ol’ exposure therapy.

I have a new secret instagram page where I’m putting content out. As soon as that starts to gain steam and I find my style and feel comfortable with my content, I will share it with friends and family. I’m not there yet (also, apparently it’s a good growth strategy not to get your network to follow your page if it’s in a domain in which you didn’t necessarily meet that network. I.e. let instagram find your audience for you. Con of this strategy: not having an initial follower boost).

Regarding my fear of solo traveling: I think this fear is mostly rooted in fear of loneliness/boredom/lack of “productivity”. I think I have a long-standing mental habit to never feel comfortable when I’m not doing something that is “productive”.

I’m going to throw the following rant on my productivity mental pattern into a collapsible section because I think it is quite dense. I’ll touch on my ongoing struggle with trying to separate myself from my existing definitions of productivity 👇

So, yeah. I’m in China, and as I write this, I’m currently in Chengdu, halfway through a 2 month trip through traveling by land through most of central and southwest/west china, culminating with a tour of Tibet. This is after the solo travel I’ve been doing throughout central Asia the past couple months 🙂.

I can feel myself getting more comfortable in a variety of situations, including hitchhiking, which I tried for the first time in Mongolia. I got picked up by the coolest person ever: a Mongolian policewoman/detective who was a former powerlifter who had even competed in my home state, Texas.

I’m also getting better at being alone (but not 100% comfortable with it yet). And I’m getting used to getting stared at everywhere I go in China, which for me has been probably the strongest culture shock, funny enough. I think I’m very sensitive to people around me - what they’re feeling, how they’re acting, etc (if you’re new here, I was junior class president of my high school, arguably my peak in life. Not that relevant, but I think still important to mention).

China is a world of its own, with a starkly different culture from most places I’ve been to. It’s one of the least “Western” places I’ve been to so far, without a doubt. Different culture, different foods, different language, different media environment, very low overlap with the West (especially the further you get away from China’s East Coast. Shanghai, for instance, is much more Western than other parts of the country).

Yet contrary to what you might hear about their people, people here have been incredibly kind. It’s actually shocking how often someone goes out of their way to show me kindness here; I can point to an example almost daily. People offering me free rides home from national parks, gifting me free things, giving me compliments, paying for meals, etc etc. One of the beautiful parts of solo traveling (and this country).

I’m digressing. My plans going forward:

• Wrap up my China trip. Head to Shangri-La, then Tibet, then Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an, Hong Kong, and one more stop by Shanghai to see my little brother (and someone special)
• Stop by the US for an indeterminate amount of time (1-3 months) for a few weddings and to see family and friends
• Go to Nepal, hike to Everest Base Camp (unguided)
  • Might visit a small Nepalese village that a close friend is connected to
  • Maybe additional hikes if I’m enjoying
• Head to India or Sri Lanka (somewhere warm)
• Then start working my way towards north India, slowly and with no schedule 🙂

I can’t explain how excited I am for the Nepal/India/Sri Lanka part of my travels. China is lovely but my travels here have been mostly “sanitized”. I mean this in the sense that China’s government has done an incredible job at building tourism-related infrastructure that can support unbelievable quantities of people. But there is a tradeoff.

China has a rating system for it’s tourist attractions, starting at 1A (lowest level) to 5A (most important and best-maintained attractions, often UNESCO approved). While all 5As that I went to (Zhangjiajie, Guilin/Yangshuo, Wulingyuan Avatar Mountains) were extremely accessible, I ended up feeling like I was a sheep being herded along. All paths were cleanly laid out in front of me, with elevators/escalators/paved walking paths/boats/shuttle buses/etc made available. I saw McDonalds and Burger Kings on top of remote mountains and inside ancient villages. It was all very... directive.

So instead, I planned to add some adventure by doing some hitchhiking from Chengdu to the legendary Shangri-La city. But as it often goes with traveling, luck wasn't on my side. I got pretty sick with a strong bacterial infection leading to tonsillitis, and have ended up spending a week here on a course of antibiotics. I’ve got to make it to Tibet by a certain time, so I’m cutting out hitchhiking this time around. But I’ll be back 🙂

I mentioned this might become a travel blog. The truth is, I have no idea what I’ll do here. Initially I intended to use this as a digital diary for learning to code and living as a digital nomad. But plans have changed significantly. As much as I loved my life in Bali, I felt this ache to travel (I had wanted to back in 2020 when I graduated, but the pandemic dashed that dream away). So I left, and now I’m back to doing the harder thing of chasing discomfort (and, by proxy, financial insecurity).

Maybe that’s what this will be about. What I’m seeing and experiencing, how I’m thinking about life, and how I’m making this phase of my life work.

I don’t really know though. Just making this up as I go.

Follow along if you like 🙂

And thank you again! (for being here)