[vmlinuz]

I'm a Brit - got a grad job at SCO in 1998, then moved to Sun in 2000 when SCO imploded, then decided to emigrate when Sun started imploding in 2005. I was initially planning to move to Israel - I'm Jewish, so don't need a visa, I speak decent Hebrew, got friends and family there, and there's plenty of tech work, but I got... diverted.

16 years later, I'm still in Hong Kong, having initially come to work for a bra company owned by a distant branch of my family, in more ways than one. Since then I've worked for an IT services company, amongst other things debugging SuSE servers in the back room of 7-11 stores, freelanced for a decade or so, built a few sites and Android apps during that period, worked for an Asia-wide 'Uber for cargo' start-up, and have now been contracting at a large bank doing devops for the past year.

Hong Kong is/was a very easy place to live as a Westerner. Everything official is bilingual, it is/was a transport hub so it was very easy to get home or anywhere else - before the Covid lockdown ended that - plenty of international food, brands, and other expats, and there is/was a fairly active local tech scene. It is/was fairly easy to get a work visa for a 'professional'-level job, but I actually got a special visa which allowed me to work, freelance, have my own business, etc. without needing to be sponsored by an employer, and after 7 years you become a permanent resident which means no more visa needed. That said, moving to Hong Kong was much more of a whim than a plan - it happened to work out pretty well, overall, but it would have been easy to back out and move back to the UK/EU if things hadn't gone well.

I have vague, but slowly firming-up, plans to leave Hong Kong next year, for all the obvious reasons (feel free to ask if they're not obvious!). Unfortunately(?), my local partner is very uninterested in leaving, so it's likely I'll be travelling solo, and my unformed plan at the moment would be to spend a bit of time in UK, maybe bum around Europe for a bit to decompress, then look into Israel - again.