I get asked about cost of living in Montevideo more than anything else. People see "Uruguay" and assume it's cheap. It's not. It's also not outrageously expensive. It's just... different from what you expect, and the things that cost a
I stored JSON in PostgreSQL for two years before I realized I was doing it wrong. I mean, I had a column called metadata typed as TEXT. I was stringifying before insert and parsing after select. It worked. It was also slow, unqueryable, and frankly embarrassing. JSONB fixes all of
I shot street photography for two years before anyone told me about composition. My photos were... fine. Exposed correctly, in focus, but boring. The kind of photos you scroll past. Then I spent a week actually studying what makes a street photo work and everything changed. It is not about
I have driven the entire coast of Uruguay more times than I can count. Montevideo to Punta del Este. Punta to La Paloma. All the way to Chuy. And back. Every single time, something went sideways that could have been avoided. Here are three lessons I learned the hard way
I have gone through more keyboards than I care to admit. Cheap rubber domes, fancy low-profile boards, even one of those split ergonomic things that made me feel like I was typing on two separate planets. After years of swapping, I landed on a setup that just works ( and no,
I have been working remotely for over five years now. Not from a hip coworking space in Lisbon with oat milk lattes. From my apartment in Montevideo, sometimes in pajamas, sometimes with mate at 10 AM because that is what everyone else does here. Nobody tells you the actual downsides.
I paid for NordVPN for two years. Then Mullvad for one. Then I realized I was paying a monthly subscription to route my traffic through someone else's server, with zero control over what they log, and a client app that insisted on updating itself at the worst possible
Six years in Montevideo. One flight back to Italy. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong. I left Seravezza Pozzi — small city in Toscana, northwest Italy — in 2014. The plan was two years abroad. Then the world had other ideas, I met someone, found a routine, and
I have been running nginx as a reverse proxy for years. Every new server, every new project, same setup. It took me way too long to stop overcomplicating it. Here is the exact configuration I use now, stripped down to what actually matters. The Minimal Config Every reverse proxy needs
I have owned probably fifteen pairs of headphones in the last decade. Over-ears, in-ears, bone conductors, the lot. Most of them are gathering dust in a drawer somewhere in Montevideo. The problem with headphones is that everyone has an opinion, and most of those opinions come from people who listened