After a year in foreign countries, I’ve returned home. Last week my working holiday visa expired, and unlike a friend of mine, I did not want to be deported in handcuffs.

I quite enjoyed my stay in Australia, the people are relax, life is good. I’ve drank lots of coffee and ate many a Kangaroo, but it’s good to be back and speak my own language. The people just “act normal“,

First I was a month in Indonesia, essentially looking for jobs in Australia (as you do), and hanging out with my then girlfriend. Then in Sydney I quickly found a job and place to live. Three interviews were pre-arranged, they all got converted into offers. The first one was stackchat, they gave me a pretty bad offer, I needed money most yet they came with equity. Then there was ayuda, I probably could’ve asked them lots more money as they were hardly strapped for cash. Openlearning offered most though, more then I asked for, which was nice. I took the highest.

Around new year the relationship with Jesiska was in crisis, and I went back to Indonesia, where it failed. Happy new year.

then, around February the company wanted to initiate sponsorship. However I had become pretty unhappy with the working arrangement. It looked like I was just being kept busy, while having no impact on anything. That working relationship also ended there.

At that point I seriously considered going back, This was my lowest point in Australia. I had nothing there except a little hobby project started with some friends. ex-Colleagues at Open Learning, I was crestfallen. Although they were being nice about my essentially destroyed life, in Netherlands we would rip on each other at this point, You could at least joke about it you know. I’m too facetious I hear.

Here I decided that rather than giving up so easily I’d fight for staying in Australia as a software engineer. I just had arranged better housing, now I bet I could also arrange better work! Easier said then done, I emailed so many companies, I even made a little movie to sell myself. Few replies but some did.

First there was Silicon Valley Chicken, they wanted to sell chicken trough an app with a game. Completely aimed at Gamers, and only order trough the app. I wasn’t too excited about that, they weren’t excited about me being on working holiday visa. After that I met Daisee at the functional programming meetup. I managed to get an interview. Turned out it was a Haskell job. I was super excited about that. Then Trunk wanted to deliver version control to designers. But I kind off neglected them in favor of the Haskell opportunity.

This was role reversal, now the friends had a pretty crappy job compared to doing Haskell. Especially considering the company had taken up Cosmos db which required running windows. They were both open source advocates, requiring to run this made them.. Unhappy.

But I was happy. For a couple of months. Daisee kept hiring people and we grew. The more time passed the more responsibility I had to give away, until I was focused upon the one project. Which then got canned. Not that it bothered me as I was planning for the next stage in my life.

Going to the Philippines! Except, everyone I spoke to was pretty negative about it, and the offer from Daisee wasn’t as nice as I expected. Back home I am, not that it’s bad, just sudden. I’ll be staying here for some time, doing remote work for Daisee as a company! Meanwhile Daisee is working on a work visa for Australia. This seems much better than the Philippines, which felt more like a golden prison.

This is all seems pretty random, oh well, such is life. I had fun at least.