As someone who is no longer a beginner: consider listening to this guy. It can be a net win for some of us.<p>I've lived a sometimes extreme version this for the past 8 years, mostly on the pacific coast of South America. My first few years were rough because I didn't know what I was doing, and it's a powerful experience that may not be for everyone, but I wish everyone had the opportunity to test it out.<p>In my beginner years, I was waaaay worse at networking than anyone reading this. The jobs I picked up were so bad, and so badly paid, and in such a bad market for software, that I dropped programming for money and spent the first three years of my funemployment doing union carpentry and union meat packing in the United States -- for 3 months a year. It turns out that 9 months surfing and 3 months of hard, enjoyable physical labor is a pretty winning combination, so I was pretty happy, but I eventually got into Ruby contracting for agencies.<p>During my funemployment in South America, I kept my love affair with code alive in a big way. I learned Ruby and its massive standard library pretty well, and also learned a new framework called Merb (which together with DataMapper made a heck of a lot more sense to me than Rails); I worked my way through 'On Lisp' for the second time; I saw the release of Arc and, giddy with excitement, took it apart from the comfort of a hammock; I experimented with Ruby metaprogramming by writing a program to play workout music and call out station changes for Crossfit workouts; I wrote an app for a friend's document translation business; I wrote a simple call-forwarding SaaS to teach myself Twilio and Paypal integration; I worked through the EMYCIN examples in Norvig's PAIP in Ruby ... all way less than part-time.<p>Most important to me personally, I finally ended up with a passion project that I actually cared a lot about.<p>A few years ago I fell utterly in love with CoffeeScript, and while walking along a road that leads to Liguiqui, in Manabì, I realized that I knew enough about the CoffeeScript AST that I could add Lisp-style macros to it, without even forking the language. I quickly sketched it out in a notebook, and for the next month or so I spent at least a few hours each week exploring the idea, which I got down to 100 lines (<a href="http://mrluc.github.io/macros.coffee/docs/macros.html" rel="nofollow">http://mrluc.github.io/macros.coffee/docs/macros.html</a>) and eventually presented to Ruby.mn when I came back to the States.<p>I'm not an expert on 'funemployment' -- but I'm not a beginner anymore, and it's been remarkably good to me, and I sing its praises to people who have the means to try it out. I just turned 31 and though my retirement savings are <i>quite</i> meager, I have some land and a house in South America now, and a great network of friends and family in both the US and abroad, and coupled with my ability to work remotely (even on connections as small as 5k/s), well, I feel pretty thankful.