About this blog…
This is the story of how I walked away from my long time career as a software engineer, in order to build my dream camper van.
To be fair, back in 2024, when I quit my job as a software engineer at Google after working there for the previous 13 years, this wasn’t exactly how I thought things would go. I knew that I was entering a new phase of my life, without a regular job, and that I should probably find some kind of project to keep myself busy while I figured out what came next. So… why not build out a fancy camper van, just like all those ones on YouTube? My wife and I have always liked getting out to wild outdoor places to go mountain biking and rock climbing, and so this seemed like a great starter project for my semi-retirement. Shouldn’t take more than three or four months, surely?…
Well, it’s been considerably more than four months since I bought the van and started building! There’s been plenty of progress, for sure, but plenty still to do. To nobody’s surprise, except perhaps my own, it turns out that designing and building a fully featured custom camper van is a ton of work, and so “DIY camper van builder” has become my new, mostly full time job, at least for the time being.
I figure there are some useful lessons to be learned from this experience, both about the practical nuts and bolts of building a camper van; and also about what we choose to do with our time once we leave the workplace. I started this blog to capture and organize some of my own thoughts on these and related issues. If you know me, or are building (or planning to build) your own camper van, or are perhaps considering a similar “career switch”, maybe you’ll find something interesting here in these pages. Enjoy!
