Remote work setup and gear

A laptop on a stand, a portable second monitor, a mechanical keyboard and a Stream Deck. That's the whole thing, and it packs into a backpack in about two minutes.

The portable monitor is the single item I'd argue hardest for. Working off one laptop screen is survivable for a week and corrosive over a year, and the weight penalty is smaller than almost any other productivity purchase you could make.

Everything else is deliberately absent. Every additional item is something to carry, insure, and replace in a country where you may not be able to replace it.

A local SIM on arrival covers data and calls, and it requires an unlocked handset — which is a thing to sort out before departure rather than at an airport counter. Co-working internet is the reliable option; apartment internet varies enormously and shouldn't be assumed.

The item most likely to genuinely ruin a week is two-factor authentication tied to a home mobile number. Banking is the critical case: if that number stops being reachable you can be locked out of your own accounts from eight thousand kilometres away. Migrate everything you can to an app-based authenticator, and start a fortnight before you fly rather than the night before.

The setup is narrow on purpose: one terminal-based AI agent as the primary work surface, running against a single repository that holds every project, the automation scripts and a markdown knowledge vault. Writing, building, research, deploying and debugging all happen through the same interface.

The reason that matters more when you're mobile than when you're not is that it collapses the number of things that have to work. One machine, one repo, one interface, everything else on a server that stays up whether or not your connection does.

The always-on half runs on a small cloud server — a workflow engine, an agent API, a vector store, and about a dozen other containers. Anything that needs to run on a schedule runs there, reports into one channel, and doesn't care which country I'm in.

Most of what I put into the machine is dictated rather than typed, which is unglamorous and probably the highest throughput-per-dollar decision in the entire stack.

The wider tooling question is worth being ruthless about when you're paying for it from a different currency. The honest test isn't whether a tool is good — it's whether you'd re-buy it today at full price knowing what you know now. More of mine have failed that test than currently pass it.

Three that actually matter, in order. Notify your bank before you travel or your card gets blocked on the first foreign transaction. Run daily spend through a multi-currency account rather than a standard debit card, because three to four per cent on every purchase compounds quietly across a year. And carry local cash for the first day — exchanging before you fly consistently beats the airport rate.

Passport validity is the one that gets people at the gate: twelve months beyond travel, enforced strictly, checked at check-in. And keep printed copies of visa approval and accommodation, because a phone screen is not always accepted at immigration and paper solves a problem that is genuinely annoying to solve any other way.