How I work on the road: a campervan, Starlink and a laptop

Most weeks I work from a desk in Portobello. Some weeks the desk is a campervan parked on a hillside, with a satellite dish on the roof and the laptop open on the passenger seat. The photo at the top is the end of one of those days in south-east Spain: eight hours of driving and building, feet up, the sun going down behind the van, nothing left to do but look at the view.

I am writing this down because a few clients have asked, usually in a slightly worried tone, what happens to their website when I am away. The short answer is nothing. The longer answer is worth a post, because the way I work on the road is the same way I work at home, and understanding it tells you quite a lot about what you are actually buying when you hire one person rather than an office.

What the setup actually is

The van is an ordinary campervan with a leisure battery and a solar panel on the roof. Next to the panel sits a Starlink dish. Starlink is a satellite internet service: a flat dish about the size of a tea tray that talks to satellites overhead and gives you a proper connection almost anywhere with a clear view of the sky. It takes a couple of minutes to find its satellites after I park, and from then on it behaves like decent home broadband. Video calls work. Uploading a site works. The only thing it does not like is a tree directly overhead.

The rest is a laptop, a phone, and the habit of charging everything while the engine is running. That is the whole office.

What changes for a client when I am away

Almost nothing, and that is by design rather than luck.

Your website does not live on my laptop. The files are kept online in a service that records every change ever made to them, so there is always a copy, and always a history of who changed what and when. The site itself is published by another online service, which means "making a change live" is me sending the new version up and waiting about a minute. That minute is the same length from a lay-by in Andalusia as it is from my kitchen table.

Your enquiries do not pass through me either. A form on a site I build goes straight to your inbox and to a record you can look at later, and a copy of each message is kept so nothing is lost if an email goes astray. If the form ever stops working, a check runs every day and emails me, which is how I would find out before you did.

Calls and emails reach me the same way they always do. If I am driving, I ring back when I stop, which is also what happens when I am in a meeting in Edinburgh.

So for the work itself, a change requested on a Tuesday gets done on a Tuesday, wherever I happen to be. The things that genuinely need me in the room are a different matter, and I will come to those.

Why I work this way

I spent years building software for companies I never visited, in cities I never saw. That taught me something simple: good work comes from habits, not from a building. Writing a change down before making it. Testing it before it goes live. Keeping a copy of everything. Telling the client what happened in plain words. None of that needs a desk with my name on it.

It also keeps my costs down. There is no office rent in what I charge, and no reception, and no account manager between you and the person doing the work. That is part of why a local business can afford to hire someone with my experience, and I would rather spend the saving on your project than on a lease.

And honestly, I like it. A day that ends with a view is a better day, and I do better work on better days.

Home is still Edinburgh, though. The van is for some weeks, not most, and the business is built for the Lothians: the shops, trades and practices within an hour of Arthur's Seat.

When being on the road is not good enough

This is the part other people leave out, so here it is.

When you need someone in the room. Setting up a till, training your staff on a new booking system, walking round a shop to see how customers actually move through it. Those are jobs for a person in the building, and they are booked for when I am home. If your project is mostly that kind of work, you will see me in Edinburgh, not on a video call.

On a launch day. When a new site goes live, or a new system takes its first real bookings, I want a desk, mains power and a second screen. I plan those days for home, and I will not take a trip across one.

Further than one hour ahead. Spain is one hour ahead of the UK, which means I am still at my desk when you ring at four in the afternoon. I do not go further than that while a project is live, because a developer who is asleep during your working day is a developer who is not really available.

When the signal is bad. The dish needs sky. A wooded campsite or a car park under a high building can be poor, and when that happens I move rather than struggle. For anything urgent I have the phone's own data as a backup. If both are bad, I tell you, and I tell you when I will be back in range.

If you want someone in your office every day. Some businesses want a developer at a desk they can walk over to. That is a perfectly good way to work, it is just not the way I work, and a local agency with staff on site would suit you better than I would. I would rather say that now than disappoint you later.

What this means for your website

If you are thinking about hiring one person rather than a company, the question underneath "what if he's away" is really "what if something goes wrong and nobody is there". The honest answer is that a well built site needs very little of anyone, and the little it needs can be done from anywhere with a connection.

That is what management and maintenance is here: the updates, the checks that run every day, the backups, and a person who answers when you ring, whether that person is in Portobello or parked on a hillside with his legs up.

Talk to me, wherever I am parked

If you would like your site looked after that way, the first step is a conversation. It happens face to face in Edinburgh and the Lothians when I am home, or on a call when I am not, and it costs nothing. I will tell you plainly whether you need ongoing care at all, or whether your site is fine as it is: book a free consultation (opens in a new tab).