Ever since I was a kid, Japan lived rent-free in my head. Not as a vacation destination — as a place I actually wanted to live. The food, the culture, the trains that run on time. I didn't know exactly how I'd get there, but I knew one thing early: I couldn't do it broke. Teaching English abroad sounded romantic until I did the math on the salary. Bills don't care what country you're in.
So the dream became a career plan. I started in general IT, picked up some certifications, and started building toward something more specialized. Then COVID happened — and while that was a disaster for most people in most ways, it gave me an unexpected gift: uninterrupted time to go deep on cybersecurity. Within a year or two I had the niche skills that commanded something I'd been working toward my whole career: a fully remote job. And with that, everything clicked into place.
"I didn't want to take a gap year. I wanted to build a career and see the world at the same time. Nobody told me that was possible. I just decided it was."
Japan was still closed when I got my remote job in May 2022 — COVID restrictions were still keeping foreign residents out. But Korea was open. So two high school friends and I looked at each other, threw down for an Airbnb in Seoul, and I sold everything in my apartment. By early September I was on a plane.
Three months in Seoul changed something fundamental. It was the first time in my life where everything felt like my decision — where I lived, when I worked, how I spent my days. That feeling is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it. Most people spend years trying to engineer it. We just booked a flight.
My boss gave me the green light to travel with one condition: stay on corporate VPN. A gentleman's handshake. But I wanted a backup — something that meant if NordVPN ever had an issue, my Korean location would never touch the company's systems. So I bought two GL.iNet Mango routers, figured out the WireGuard configuration, and set up a tunnel back to the US. They were painfully slow. I used them in a pinch. But the architecture was there — and I didn't fully realize yet what I'd built.
Japan eventually opened, and I made it. Tokyo is unlike any other city I've been to. It takes time to find your social crowd — the city is enormous and a little overwhelming at first. But once you do, it rewards you. I found my people in the workout scene, which is how it always goes for me wherever I travel.
Working US hours from Tokyo means working evenings and nights. That sounds rough on paper. In practice, when you're abroad and your days are genuinely free — to explore neighborhoods, eat things you've never heard of, train with people from every corner of the world — the schedule stops feeling like a sacrifice. It becomes just how your days work.
But Tokyo also brought real technical pressure. I was taking on clients in financial services, and these weren't casual arrangements. Financial institutions don't let you connect to their systems from outside the US — full stop. No exceptions for circumstances, no workarounds. The connection had to be clean, it had to be consistent, and it could never, under any circumstances, show a foreign IP. Not for a second.
The slow Mango routers weren't going to cut it anymore. I started researching better hardware, a faster implementation, a more reliable tunnel. Kill switches. Failover. Relay servers for when port forwarding wasn't an option. I was building HomeLink — I just hadn't named it yet.
Around the same time, people started asking how I was doing it. Friends I'd made in Tokyo's fitness community — people who wanted to travel, who had jobs worth keeping, who were stuck because they didn't know how to bridge the gap between their US connection requirements and wherever they wanted to go.
I set up the Mango solution for one friend. She took it to Vietnam, then to Canada. It worked — barely, but it worked. She got to go. That mattered more than the latency.
When a second person asked, something clicked. I started doing research. There are guides online for this — WireGuard documentation, GL.iNet forums, Reddit threads from sysadmins who'd figured pieces of it out. But they assume a level of comfort with networking that most people just don't have. And if you're not technical, you hit the port forwarding section and you stop. You close the tab. You book a normal vacation instead of the life you wanted.
"This experience changed my life. I didn't want it to be something only technically inclined people could access. That felt wrong."
Since that first Airbnb in Seoul, I've built a life that moves. Nine countries so far, with more planned.
The list of countries is almost beside the point. What matters is the texture of the experience — the hotel director I met in Greece who gave me an entirely different picture of what hospitality means at scale, the university students in Seoul who were navigating life questions I'd asked myself at their age, the gym in Tokyo where nobody cared where you were from as long as you showed up and worked hard.
You can't really explain what extended immersion does to you until it happens. I came back more patient. More curious. More willing to sit with discomfort — which is, it turns out, the prerequisite for almost every good thing that happens when you travel. I'm more confident, not because the world is smaller than I thought, but because I know now that I can navigate it.
Given the times we're heading into — and I think most people feel the turbulence even if they can't name it — I think that kind of exposure to difference, to people who live entirely differently and still want the same things, matters more than it ever has.
I'm back in the US now, building this out properly. The version that exists today is a long way from two slow Mango routers in a Seoul Airbnb. Pre-configured hardware, a relay server that handles CGNAT and changing home IPs, a kill switch hardcoded at the firmware level so a software update can never quietly undo it, a portal that manages the whole thing.
But the reason hasn't changed. There are people right now with remote jobs and a country they've always wanted to live in — their version of my Japan. The only thing standing between them and that life is a technical problem that shouldn't require a cybersecurity background to solve. HomeLink is the solution I built for myself, packaged for everyone else who needs it.
Plug in at home before you leave. Pack the travel router. Land wherever you're going. Connect. Everything else stays exactly the same.
That's it. Go see the world.
"HomeLink has made possible what I never imagined — working remotely from anywhere in the world securely and privately."
Everything I built for myself, pre-configured and ready to ship. Plug in at home, pack the travel router, and go.