 Things that I've learned in speaking is that you should never start a talk with an apology But I actually need to issue an apology early So I'm gonna start by telling you a joke and then come back to the apology So why did the junior software developer quit his job? Because after two years of work, he still didn't get a raise tough tough room All right, let's play this so These slides hopefully are gonna autoplay for you guys So I went on a two-year road trip in an RV and I worked remotely the entire time and I took a ton of pictures And so the apology is that if you're friends with me, Micah and family Or you follow me on Twitter and you've never seen any of these pictures. It's because I suck at social sharing So these are like some of the best pictures and highlights from our two-year trip We went all around the country went up the east coast actually started in Asheville That was kind of where we kicked off our trip I came here a couple years ago did a talk and then we left for two years Went out west spent a ton of time out in Utah, California, Arizona New Mexico Montana, Oregon, Washington, I mean everywhere out west. So it was really awesome took a lot of pictures I tried to arrange these chronologically based on my beard length, but I didn't do a very good job of that So as we get a little bit later in these slides It's gonna get a little bit scarier as as my lack of shaving if you want to see a cool story Ask me later about the elk antler story So Road trip aside the point of this talk is what did I actually learn as I was going out on the road living in an RV? I generally had very limited Wi-Fi connectivity But I was still working mostly full-time doing development a lot of WordPress and kind of what? What did I pick up from that experience? So I'm gonna try and share some of that with you here briefly So the first one I want to talk about is Camping hacks in general so these have nothing to do with WordPress directly But these are good things to know if you want to go camping and living in the middle of nowhere But you still want to be able to make software So first of all there's two apps one is called Camp and DM the other one is called sensor Lee Camp and DM is awesome because it tells you about free campsites all across the country where you can go live for free for Up to 14 days and nobody will bother you It also will tell you how many bars of 4g based on the network provider is available at that campsite I learned that all you need to successfully push code to get Remotely is two bars of Verizon 4g Okay, that is not enough to do a video conference on zoom or Even make a phone call Okay, so if your workload involves being on phone calls and stand-ups schedule Accordingly so that you can get to somewhere that has good internet another quick tip is that Campgrounds all Advertised that they have Wi-Fi that is a lie There is no such thing as Wi-Fi at a campground. They all suck a hundred percent Do not even think you're going to go check into a campground and use their Wi-Fi to do anything productive at all ever Did I make that point clear? They don't work Okay, so that's just a little bit about like camping hacks in general So let's talk a little bit about some of the WordPress specific stuff since this is a word camp, right? So a couple of things on doing remote development work with WordPress that You need to know about if you have very little internet and in some cases very little electricity So I have a 12-volt battery system in my camper that I can run for about two days If you're going to calculate how long you can last on battery You need to know your electrical consumption in amps and you multiply that by the number of hours that you plan on running on your battery So I have a 200 amp hour system, which means I can run one amp for 200 hours If I'm running 200 amps, I can only run for one hour Okay, so I was actually looking at how much power is my computer using while I'm on the road and I figured out that Most modern HDMI TVs use AC power Which means I have to convert the DC power to AC which is a very inefficient conversion And then that TV is going to suck power even when it's not on Computer monitors on the other hand offer the ability to have a DC input So you find a computer monitor with a 12-volt input You cut the end of the cord off where the big heavy block is and you throw that away And then you strip the wires off put it on your 12-volt battery And now you don't have to convert the power to AC just to convert it back to DC to run the TV. Does that make sense? I also I also took my Mac charger cord the little brick that sticks in the wall And I cut that off too and strip the wires and put that straight on my 12-volt system I found out the hard way that Macs actually require a very clean source of power They require that power to be very Well, like if you look at the actual electrical wavelengths of the power that your Mac requires It needs to be very clean Unfortunately deep cycle marine batteries do not produce very clean power So I have a very expensive paperweight in my camper that just so happens to look like a Mac Air So know your power consumption bait plan on that figure out how long is it going to take you to run your batteries? I actually use a Raspberry Pi with my little computer monitor and I can do everything I need on right around one amp So that means that on just those battery charges alone on a single charge I can run for 200 hours, and I'm good to go that doesn't include charging my cell phone Other than that So I nor cross is here, but I don't think he's in the room So there's a really cool plugin called airplane mode It was developed by a guy named nor cross who is here at this word camp if you haven't talked to him go Go talk to him. He's a cool dude What it basically does is it disables all of the remote calls that wordpress makes and it and it Rerouts those to local resources So for example when you load up your dashboard and wordpress checks to find out if a new version of wordpress is available That's a remote call back to the wordpress API And so when that call is being made and you don't have internet That call is going to take 30 seconds before it times out and fails Which means that your page load just to load the dashboard add 30 seconds to it right not very productive in fact When you don't have internet loading the wordpress dashboard at all is not very productive Right anything that I have to do that I have to actually go into the back end and do is going to take a lot longer with no internet So learn WPC li is everybody in here at least use WPC li. Okay. Hey who in here is a master at WPC li Okay, this is your call to action go Master WPC li I don't mean just like figure out how to do a couple little things here and there like go become a freaking master at it And your productivity will go a thousand percent higher than what it is today Yeah WPC li is a command line interface for wordpress and it allows for you to do all sorts of goodness like Creating users changing passwords creating content updating settings installing activating and deactivating plugins or themes updating core Deleting caches Creating post types. There's so many things that you can do with it and in order to get good at it You really also need to be pretty proficient with bash not maybe an expert, but you need to at least look at it So one of the things that I found to be very helpful in my connectivity So again everything that I was doing I had it was very slow just took ages to make a simple connection So I learned how to do things via the CLI because an SSH connection requires the tiniest little bit of Connectivity versus an actual browser loading of the WordPress site So if someone would call me and say something like hey my password is it I need to reset my password rather than having to log Into WordPress and wait for that page to load. I could just run those commands over SSH, which is much more efficient There's a really cool thing you can do with SSH Which is basically you edit your bash RC file in your user profile on your remote server And you can set it up to run a list of commands every time you log in So for example, one of the one of the things that I had to do really frequently was I had to deploy our application from Development to stage or stage to production and every time I did it I had to log in and I had to copy all of those commands in and Wait for them to finish and sometimes a deployment could take me an hour because those commands were taking a long time to complete Mainly because of my internet connection. So what I did was I created two users I created a user called deploy stage and a user called deploy prod I put all the deployment scripts into my bash RC file And then all I had to do was on my computer one command log into that server And as soon as it logged in I knew that all those scripts were going to run And then I could just leave my computer alone And I could go play a little bit more and I didn't have to do anything because that was just going to run And it's all being done on the on a remote machine So my connection has nothing to do with the speed with which that application actually completes So that was nifty And then the other thing is reducing any sort of external dependencies So how many of you have ever seen a plug-in or theme that dequeues the WordPress provided jQuery and supplements it with some sort of JQuery that's on a CDN. I Freaking hate you Don't do that Okay, so like I actually have a plug-in that just looks at all the enqueued assets and then tells me if there's any that are Remote and then if they do it just dequeues that asset So I don't have to wait for any remote error remote calls to time out or 404 or whatever they're gonna do All right, so that's a little bit about WordPress stuff So the other thing I wanted to talk about was redundancy So these things have to do mostly with developing But I realized as I was putting these up that there's actually a lot of benefit to having these even if you're not gonna Go travel and live in a camper The first one is electricity you need to have more than one sources of electricity Now if you work in an office, you can pretty much assume that your power is gonna stay on But what if your power goes off? How are you gonna get your work done? Do you does your office have a battery backup of some type that you can work off of at least for a little while to get Things done if your power goes out if not you probably should When I was working I got hit by an electrical storm Lightning struck within a mile of our camper and I lost all of our power So I had I was working with an enterprise client. I won't name them But they're one of the really really big WordPress multi sites that runs and they I was on the call with them as a sales call and I had just lost all the power in my camper So I was literally sitting there on the phone with them in the gas station parking lot plugged into an extension cord that was On unauthorized plugged into the gas station's power taking notes on paper Right. I was like man if the people had have seen me on taking notes on paper They probably would not have given us that contract. So have have backups for electricity have backup devices I mentioned that I fried my laptop. That was actually the second laptop that I fried on the trip So it really stinks when you have no computer. So have backup devices, right? What happens if if your office gets broken into and they steal your computers? What are you going to do on the next day? Like do you have a backup plan for covering your devices? Similarly for internet providers, right? What happens if your cable connection goes out? Do you have a 4g backup that you can rely on these are things that even though you may not be traveling and going off-grid? It's still really important to have just in terms of being able to conduct this business reliably There was a hat do you who does anybody remember when all the DNS in the world went out and Twitter was off for like two days? Okay Having some way to communicate if you rely on something like Twitter to communicate and it goes down. What are you going to do? So just things like that with social media There was a really cool hack where I took the get hub IP address and put it into my Etsy host file so that I didn't need to do DNS lookups any time I talked to get hub So if my DNS went down I could still communicate with get hub even though I didn't have DNS So that was really helpful And then lastly is version control everything like if it's important to you put it on get hub It can be private now, but literally I put everything on get hub that I can't I have so many private repositories It's ridiculous because like even simple things like that deployment process that I mentioned Well, if that script gets lost and I've got a rewrite a deployment script that could be hours of lost productivity So keep everything version controlled by version control almost everything in my life now if it's text-based basically And so that's kind of it on the redundancy pieces a couple of just inspirational thoughts So let me think Yeah so I Mentioned this road trip obviously as you can see from these pictures. I went to more than a couple cool places There's a lot of amazing stuff in this country, and I feel like I still haven't seen it all In fact, I feel like the more I see the more I realize how much is out there that I haven't seen and that I want to go see These places are not gonna be here forever So if you have a desire to go see something go see it right now like don't even come back to word camp to not I'm just getting like Julian's like I'm gonna kill you so Yeah, like if you have a if you have a desire to travel go do it We live in a time when this is possible We have the technology to make this possible and I think in myself included like it's so easy to just get in the habit of Not doing anything That's cool and amazing because you have so much work to do like take your work with you take it on the road Go travel for a week say hey, I'm gonna take a week and I'm gonna go work remotely and if your employer doesn't like that then Find another one right or quit your job and be a freelancer and go travel and do what you want to do The other one is maybe go for like a month or even a year There's a whole bunch of different programs out there where developers from all around the country Will actually get paid to go work remotely for a month They rent a huge awesome house Usually in some really amazing place like Thailand and then all the developers just move into that house for a month And they all do their jobs remotely and then they get to hang out in Thailand for a whole month So like find cool stuff like that and do it because it's worth it It's worth just getting out of your comfort zone seeing some of this awesome stuff. That's out there and and I think the main thing I wanted to walk away with is So we lived in Atlanta for my entire life. So the first 32 years of my life I was in Atlanta when you live in one place for a long time you tend to collect a lot of stuff You know, you have all these tie-downs. I had a job. I had my kids were in a school We had a network of friends that we enjoyed hanging out with and in a short period of time We literally sold all of our stuff. We withdrew our kids from their school I quit my job. We moved out of our house and we literally Started with nothing everything that we own fit in the back of a pickup truck. So don't be afraid to start over Right, you can always take an iteration and say what is version 2 of my life going to look like and Be willing and be ready to to really start over and and and reinvent yourself So that's it for me. I'm out of time. Maybe we have time for one or two quick questions Or we can just sit here and look at my cute kids question What did I do for health insurance for two years? Scary I know Actually, we did have health insurance for a good portion of that trip Thankfully, I had an employer that I could work completely remotely for And so they I had health insurance there But there was a good like six months out of that two years where we were definitely fingers crossed And when we got back on to health insurance like everybody went and got everything fixed. It was like, yeah, I Broke a tooth while I was traveling And I wouldn't I wouldn't finally went to the dentist and got it dealt with so, you know, there was that Other quick questions. Yeah Did I use a screen for anything? The command screen no, I don't think so Yeah, so I forgot to mention this so one of the things that I did was I I used a lot of like cloud-based computing So I actually took had a VM that was running on on a cloud a cloud-based system and then I could just log into that VM and then Yeah, yeah, yeah, and actually that was really neat So one of the projects that I did I had to migrate a website that was over 10 years old and it had over I think it was a million posts and almost Three million images and I had to migrate it from point a to point b And so if I was going to try to pull that down to my Local forget it, right so instead I pulled I created a cloud-based instance just for transferring those files And I moved it across the internet without ever having to come back to my to my home and that really helped speed things up Yeah, by the way, I get repo that's over a hundred megs takes like never finishes when you haven't So they keep your repo small too. Thank you