bitofarambler
Q&A for any and all questions you might have about traveling.
FAQ
are there requirements to be an ESL teacher other than being a fluent English speaker?
nope.
some countries and schools require a TEFL certificate or prefer candidates with an associate's degree depending on the position, but if you want to teach English, all you need is to be a fluent English speaker.
how can you afford to travel long-term?
The cost of living in most countries is around $500 USD a month for transportation, rent, utilities and food altogether; teaching English pays $2000 USD a month with zero qualifications or experience.
every month I taught English, I had a few extra months of my cost of living.
I taught English for about 7 years.
as long as you're making more than 500 USD a month remotely in any job, you can travel long-term.
What's the best country?
Depends on what you're looking for.
For backpacking, Japan. For natural history museums, Ireland. For food, China. For cost of living, Cambodia or India.
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I was in school for electrical engineering and took a single C course in the second year. Absolutely fell in love with the idea of programming, dropped out of university and switched to a college programming course. Been a programmer for 8 years this may.
Ah, very cool, congrats!
Do most programmers focus on one or two languages, whatever is relevant to their job or are you supposed to learn as many as possible?
What is the driving force behind programmers learning different languages?
Good question! For me the language isn't too important, kinda like with normal languages, it's all about the concepts being conveyed. With programming those concepts are, at a basic level; variables, conditions, lists, loops, objects, and functions. All (decent) languages with have the ability to convey these concepts one way or another, so it's just typically just comes down to syntax when learning a new language.
Obviously there are some exceptions where old or niche languages don't support something. But typically once you know 'programming' the language doesn't matter too much. For me, I use a few different languages depending on what I'm working on. Front-end web stuff; Javascript. Server side logic; nodejs and groovy. Database; SQL.
The driving force behind learning new languages (again for me) has been either for work because that's what is in use and I need to modify existing code, or because I've seen the language in use somewhere else and want to try it out.
Hope some of that answered your question :)
I see, yes, that's an extremely helpful answer.
Knowing that the programming functions themselves are fairly universal under the layer of syntax that briefly broadly defines a programming language is clarifies my understanding of programming as a whole.
now it seems less daunting to choose a first language to learn.