Matthias Schaffer
von Matthias Schaffer

Matthias Schaffer, Remote Worker

Frontend developer & digital nomad

Matthias Schaffer is a member of the welance community and has worked with us on Wordpress projects for the past two years sucessfully. Now, he has made the decision to drastically change his way of working.

You sold everything and left Berlin to experience a nomad life. 

Apart from having enough of big city life (pollution, noise & missing nature) my wife and I realized after every past camping holiday that we (and our 4 year old son) had, we've never really needed all the stuff from our flat in Berlin. And each time we came back into our urban routine it felt like a slap in the face. I guess the majority is familiar with this feeling after a vacation. But after the last summer we have come to a point where the common excuses didn’t work out for us anymore.

So we decided to sell and give away most of our stuff. After three exhausting and nerve-wrecking months we left Berlin at the beginning of this year. Our initial plan was to drive around Europe in a mobile home, but it turned out to be too complicated to minimise our stuff, buy a proper vehicle and move into it in one step.

At the moment, we are staying at a friend’s lovely 200 year old farmhouse in my small Austrian hometown. I have absolutely no idea what will happen in the next few years but almost everything seems possible. I feel quite privileged to have a profession that makes this kind of lifestyle possible, because I’m not dependent to a certain place and can work from wherever I want.

matthias-schaffer

Photo: Matthias in front of the farmhouse

 

You are a passionate frontend developer - what projects are you working on?

Generally, I'm working on WordPress based websites and at the moment on one for my favourite café in Berlin-Charlottenburg for which I coded a very custom masonry layout including a fancy jQuery scrollbar. Apart from that I have some personal long term projects which I am working on whenever there is time: setting up niche affiliate websites and improving my workflow for theme-building, deployments, version-control, etc.

 

What are your 5 points to do for being successful at working remotely?

1. Make sure to have a reliable internet connection wherever you are working from. It ensures you direct access to your clients.
2. Connect and work mainly with people, who love or at least accept remote work, too. They will understand what you do and why you are doing it.
3. Be structured, polite and professional.
4. Take enough breaks and go offline when your daily work is done.
5. Appreciate it. It’s truly a gift to work from wherever you want.