Van-Life Work Setup for Data Scientists

Jason Bian
7 min readMay 29, 2021

With soaring real-estate prices, friends in different cities, and the promise of a minimalistic life free of modern trappings, I have been building a van-house within my Ford Transit 250 high roof.

Ford Transit 250 partly built!

One of my first concerns is how do I enable my identify as a data scientist in this van-life journey as I am not the typical influencer/programmer that synergize with this lifestyle. To enable a sustainable career in the van, I need to ensure good technological capacity to grow and compete globally.

Internet connectivity is the lifeblood of our analytics and technology based work, with the advent of several emerging technologies such as Starlink and 5G rollout, we are nearing the possibilities of consumer grade edge computing, lidar systems, and simple internet of things applications. Additionally, with VR, AR, and large bandwidth capacity promises from the coming 5G rollout, large analytics/streaming workloads can be run on our local machine and video conferencing can be of instantaneous frame-rate quality.

To do quality work in van-life, we want internet that is of comparable quality as a workstation in the office and we will use this as our competitive advantage in the remote work landscape. This necessitates powerful computers, sufficient battery capacity, duo monitors, and enabling a reliable wifi setup with sufficient speeds…

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Jason Bian
Jason Bian

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