Who is Dima Pashutskii?
Dima is a Russian software engineer who turned a career switch into a passport. He progressed from phone support to network engineering and server administration, then taught himself to code.
In 2018, he and his wife Nika left home to travel full time. They spent four years as digital nomads across Southeast Asia, with long stays in Chiang Mai, Bali, Penang, and Tbilisi. That is where we met, in George Town in Penang.
When Russia escalated the war in Ukraine in 2022, they settled in the Netherlands and moved to Amsterdam in June 2026. These days he calls himself an indie maker rather than a contractor or an employee.
He quit his job in 2024 to build his own products, including Influesque and Search to Play, and he publishes on his YouTube channel about freedom, money, and intentional living. Check his blog to follow where he is now.
Dima's projects and links
- dpashutskii.com — Dima's personal blog
- Dima on YouTube — his main creative outlet since 2018 and still the place he posts most
- Dima on GitHub — his public repositories
- Dima on X — the account he was tweeting from as @guar47 during the nomad years
- Influesque — the YouTube influencer marketing platform he is focused on right now
- Search to Play — his database for video games, born out of a childhood spent reading Russian gaming magazines
- Taco Digest — his tool for turning newsletters into personal email digests instead of algorithmic feeds
- Guide to Buying a House in the Netherlands — the ebook he wrote for expats after going through it himself
- Dima's projects page — the full archive
- Dima's Nomads.com profile — his public trip history and future plans
Freelancing, platforms, and how remote pay works
- Upwork — where Dima found his first client and where he wants you to know the first review matters more than the first fee
- Fiverr — I brought this one up as the opposite end of the marketplace spectrum
- Toptal — the vetted network I mentioned. Dima explains why its location-based rates work against people from lower-cost countries
- Automattic — the company behind WordPress. I quoted Matt Mullenweg on paying distributed teams the same wherever they choose to live
- Facebook's pandemic-era remote pay policy — the decision to adjust salaries down for staff who moved somewhere cheaper
Learning to code from scratch
- Hexlet — the Russian-language platform Dima learned on, built on SICP examples rewritten in JavaScript
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — the MIT book underneath that course
- Lisp — the language SICP uses, stripped back to logic and fundamentals
- Ruby — his main server language today, after PHP and JavaScript
- Node.js — not popular enough yet when he picked PHP for his first full-stack job
- 100DaysOfCode — the public accountability challenge that gave him the idea for Learning Story
The maker and indie hacker communities
- Indie Hackers — where he started reading founder stories and decided to build his own products
- MakerLog — the daily shipping log he used every day and names as his main inspiration
- WIP — the other maker community we both follow
- Duolingo — his example of a learning platform with its own walled-off community
- Smart Progress — the Russian-only goal tracking site closest to his idea, which by then looked abandoned
Cities and destinations
- Saint Petersburg — where Dima grew up, and the city I was reading about at the time of recording
- Gatchina — the small city in the Saint Petersburg region where he spent much of his childhood
- Karelia — the nature escape about five hours away
- Moscow — Nika's home city, and still Dima's favorite in Russia
- Vienna — where he first noticed how much Peter the Great borrowed from Europe
- Lisbon — Nika's exchange semester, and the three months where Dima learned to code and fell in love with travel
- Hua Hin — the small Thai town where their nomad life actually started, with no plan at all
- Chiang Mai — the original nomad hub, popular before Bali took over
- Canggu, Bali — where Dima was based when we recorded, and where he says people arrive and simply never leave
- George Town, Penang — where we met in person
- Taipei — the capital of his favorite country in the region
- Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung — the west coast cities they reached by bullet train, each with its own character
- Singapore — great for a few days, expensive as a base
- Da Nang — one of the settle-down cities in their travel
Piotrek Bodera
Food, health, and daily routine
- HappyCow — the purple cow app, effectively Google Maps for vegans and vegetarians
- Vitamin B12 — the one supplement he flags for anyone cutting out meat and dairy
- Insight Timer — his current meditation setup, which is a timer and silence
- Headspace and Calm — the guided apps most people start with, including him
- Down Dog — the yoga app I asked him about. They were using a YouTube-based app instead
Odds and ends
- Peter the Great — I was reading a history book about him and the founding of Saint Petersburg while we recorded
- Skype — we recorded this on it in July 2020. It has since been shut down, and my producer rescued the audio
- TikTok — my example of a non-Western platform beating the incumbents at their own game
- Nomads.com — formerly Nomad List. I asked whether he used it to pick the next city
Timestamps / Chapters for the Dima Pashutskii episode
00:00 Start.
00:36 Why a Skype recording from 2020 is finally seeing daylight.
03:01 Hello from Canggu: Dima checks in from the Bali hub.
03:40 St Petersburg and Moscow: two cities, one long-distance relationship.
04:28 Fired on a Friday; moved to Moscow the same day.
05:57 Gatchina, Karelia, and why Peter the Great built a European city.
08:09 Moscow's rush as a career accelerator, mental health tax included.
10:16 McDonald's, construction sites, and Dima's stint as a children's clown.
12:01 The case for doing manual work before you do knowledge work.
14:26 Lisbon for three months: the Schengen ninety-day ceiling as a travel plan.
16:02 Learning to code from a Russian site teaching SICP in JavaScript.
19:35 Upwork: sixty applications a month and four months of silence.
20:15 Two days of work for five dollars, and the review that made it worth it.
21:36 Fiverr, Toptal, and where the marketplace race to the bottom starts.
23:03 Location-based pay: your rate decided by your postcode, not your work.
24:32 Automattic versus Facebook on pay parity, six years before everyone else argued about it.
26:08 Off the platform: direct contract, hourly billing, twenty tracked hours a week.
27:53 Learning Story and 100DaysOfCode: building in public before it had a name.
31:52 One community for all your learning, instead of a community per course site.
35:14 Nobody opens an original coffee shop: the case against waiting for an original idea.
36:58 Indie Hackers, MakerLog, and the pull of owning your own products.
37:23 Digital Nomad Journey: writing the visa and banking guide he needed when he started.
40:51 Sixteen cities: Hua Hin by accident, Chiang Mai by reputation.
41:36 Taiwan is underrated: bullet trains, west coast cities, and the friendliest people in Asia.
44:17 Singapore for a week, Penang for months: choosing a base.
45:26 Travel months and settle-down months: slowmadding before it had a hashtag.
48:41 Going vegetarian on the road, and where HappyCow stops helping.
52:15 The pizza fallback, and why nothing actually changed when he quit meat.
54:16 Yoga in the room, meditation without an app, and cities with no pavements to run on.
56:31 Wrap up.
Dima Pashutskii podcast quotes
The routine we took is perfect for nomading, because you can combine a lot of travel months with settle-down months when you can get the job done. It's always a combination of the right ratio for every person.
I actually had to do a really easy job for some guy from Ukraine. It was two days of work for five dollars. But it was my first job and it was my first review.
It took me three or four months to find the first client.
A lot of people, especially when they're starting a new business or side project, they try to be really, really original. Nobody had done this before. In offline business, nobody is thinking about doing a really original coffee shop. They just open a new coffee shop.
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