About Full Stack Van
This is the story of how I walked away from my successful career as a software engineer, in order to build my dream camper van.
OK, that’s a bit of a simplification. To be honest, when I quit my job at Google in 2024, after working there for the previous 13 years, I didn’t really know what I was going to do next. Freed from the constraints of a full time job (and the associated income!) I figured I should probably find some kind of project to keep myself busy while I figured out what to do with the rest of my life.
My better half, Amy, and I had long talked about the idea of getting a camper van to make it easier to get out to wild outdoor places to go mountain biking and rock climbing, and so fairly quickly, I decided that this was going to be the “starter project” for my semi-retirement. We’d buy a modestly priced cargo van, and then I’d spend a few months converting it into a suitable vehicle for our outdoor adventures. After spending the previous few decades shackled to a computer all day, I was really looking forward to doing some “real” engineering and actually creating something physical with my hands.
Inevitably of course, my “starter project” turned into a much bigger endeavor than I’d imagined. “A few months” became considerably longer than that, and “DIY van builder” has become my new full time job…
And so, I’ve decided to write about my experience! My plan is to write a new post every few weeks here, documenting my (ongoing) journey towards building a finished camper van. One of the results of that will be a complete "build guide" detailing everything I did along the way, that hopefully might be of use to other people working on their own vans.
Whether you’re a van builder yourself, or are just thinking about building a van; or you’re a software engineer thinking about what projects you’ll work on after AI steals your job; or you just know me from somewhere, I hope you’ll find something useful and/or entertaining in these pages.
If you want to follow along, you can also subscribe to get an email notification whenever I post something new. Enjoy!
