Cúcuta → BA → world: a notebook on relocating
I have moved countries twice for engineering.
Cúcuta to Bogotá first, then Bogotá to Buenos Aires. The next move is still in progress — it’s called “the internet.”
What I expected to be hard
- Language (I was wrong — my English was fine for async work)
- Timezone (I was wrong — LATAM hours overlap well with EU and US East)
- Visa paperwork (I was right — this is genuinely hard)
What was actually hard
The writing.
Not the code. Not the tooling. The English writing. Not because my English was bad but because my writing voice was in Spanish. The jokes landed differently. The email tone was off. I spent three months writing very formal English before I figured out how to be myself in the language.
The thing that unlocked it: I started taking notes in English. Not translating notes — thinking in English first. The vault is now ~60% English, ~40% Spanish, depending on the topic. DevOps notes are in English because the community is in English. Mental models notes are in Spanish because that’s how I reason about them.
The visa question
I won’t pretend this is resolved. LATAM-to-EU is not easy for software engineers. The path I’m working on is: build a public record, get a remote role with a company that has EU presence, convert to a sponsored visa.
The “build a public record” part is why this site exists.
What I’d tell someone starting the same path
- Write in English from day one. Not just your code — your thinking.
- Build in public. A GitHub profile, a blog, an API that shows what you know. AI screening tools are real and they need data to work with.
- Get a cert. Not because it proves you’re good, but because it proves you were serious enough to sit an exam.
- Find the community. There are more LATAM engineers at EU and US companies than the job boards make it seem.
The path is not straight. But it exists.