To get a sense of where AI is now, I set out on an experiment. I want to better track my family’s spending, so I gave myself two days to create a web app, with AI’s help. I wasn’t sure how far I’d get, or the quality of the output, but I was curious to find out.

Process

To start, I wrote down the initial features and rough workflow I wanted. I then put my requirements into Claude Code and used the /plan mode to walk through core features and tech considerations.

From there, I iterated feature-set to feature-set. After creating the transaction table, we then added CSV importing, and so on. Claude would create the design and code, I’d review the work, and together we’d iterate on refinements.

Everything proceeded very smoothly. I rarely had to roll back changes. It became almost addictive to think up a useful feature, and then have it ready to use in minutes.

So what did Claude Code (with my guidance) create? Here’s a quick tour of the results:

But for an app to install on my local network and use for myself? It is almost perfect. Instead of paying for another SaaS subscription, I have a near fully-functional app that I own and control. Plus, my data isn’t sitting in some remote database being used for who knows what.

Of course this is far from a “finished” app and not something to release publicly. It has no user accounts, the math is sometimes questionable, and other gremlins are certainly lurking in the shadows.

What worked

Using Claude Code planning mode

Before implementing a bunch of new code, I’d create a short planning document which covers the features I want, how they work, and note any forward thinking code or architecture considerations. I always ended the document with the instructions: “Ask me questions to clarify product or technical requirements, engineering principles, and hard constraints.” This helped both Claude and I nail down what I wanted before getting into code, saving time and tokens.

Being specific on the tech stack

I’m most familiar with Laravel, PHP, and MySQL, so I included these in my initial requirements. I also wanted to keep my code-base simple, so I told Claude to stick with vanilla JS and CSS (no React, Tailwind, etc.). This kept things light and meant I could easily jump into code if needed. In the end, I barely touched the code, though I did feel guilty spending tokens asking Claude to change single lines of CSS now and then.

Working iteratively

In prior tests, I’ve tried “one-shot” prompts to create complete apps, but found it rarely works out well. When an LLM (or human) fill in ambiguity without thinking, weird things tend to happen. Working iteratively meant I could think about the next steps and identify potential opportunities and problems. This reduced rework and saved time.

What I’d do differently

Using a design system

One significant negative of creating from scratch is, well, everything needs to be created. For simple UI components, like buttons, this isn’t a big deal. However, with more complex components, things get messy quickly. This is exacerbated by Claude not being great at small design or interaction details.

For example, my app uses a complex multi-select dropdown in about a dozen places. I often ran into bugs where Claude hadn’t considered an edge case (what happens if the dropdown is in a modal, or it opens down beyond the screen edge). I ran into similar challenges with tables, modals, and other common components.

I spent many tokens fine-tuning these component-level issues. If I had used a good design system, this thinking would have been already baked-in. Plus, with better design defaults, the overall look-and-feel would probably be better.

Prompt for pattern-thinking

Claude Code seems biased toward writing more code rather than broader systems thinking. I found this can cause messy architecture and duplicated code.

For example, in my spending app, you can add a payee in three different locations: in the payee section, when importing transactions, or when editing a transaction. Claude Code created three different approaches (and code for each) for each implementation. They looked quite similar, so I was confused why changes to one weren’t reflected in the others.

While it is easy to prompt Claude to refactor into shared components, creating shared components earlier can save time and prevent rework.

Reflections

There’s a lot of hype around these tools, and for good reason. Many are predicting the end of developers, a SaaS apocalypse, or worse. I think we’re a bit away from these predictions.

I have more than a decade’s worth of experience creating applications, so it is easy for me to prompt for the features, flows, and architecture I wanted. Put these tools in the hands of someone with less experience and they’ll struggle. Tools are being created to help non-technical people create tools like this, but product creation experience will be difficult to design around.

If I could tell you with confidence where we’ll end up, I’d be investing and not writing this post. It is hard to imagine these tools not causing an enormous disruption. The latest lay-offs blaming AI are certainly over-stating the current effectiveness, but the fundamental changes will come. Much depends on how capable the models become, how quickly, and what their true, non-subsidized costs will be. We’ll see. It will be fascinating to watch, at the very least.

You can find out more in a little introductory video I put together:

We’re still quite early in the renovation process, and will be sharing more on our new YouTube channel. So go like, subscribe, comment, and all that fun stuff!

Starting our journey

Next, was the question of how to get there. We originally considered a two week train journey, meandering through various cities and towns along the way (particularly: Leipzig, Bamburg, Würzburg, and others). After sketching this out, we figured it would make for a hectic and not particularly relaxing vacation. Instead, we settled on a short Berlin-to-Stuttgart flight, then a two hour drive to Freiburg.

As an aside, Freiburg technically has an airport, the EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg, but flights were inconvenient or expensive. The airport is a curious entity, serving as the main airport for Germany’s Freiburg and Switzerland’s Basil, but is in neither country, being situated in France. For a time, the airport was divided in two, with one part under French jurisdiction and the other under Swiss. Now, Switzerland is in the Schengen zone, but, if you get a Swiss customs official, you still may get a Swiss stamp on your passport, despite arriving on French soil.

After the flight into Stuttgart, we started our drive south to Freiburg. Signs along the way tempt you to stop at this castle or that palace. Feeling hungry (and rather curious), we decided to visit Schloss Haigerloch, an 800 year-old former fortress. Restored in the 1970s, it is now a beautiful hotel and excellent restaurant. Nearby, in an interesting bit of trivia, is the Atomkeller Museum, where Nazi scientists worked to develop nuclear fission. Now well-fed, we turned west, driving on narrow roads through the low ancient mountains of the German southwest.

Exploring Freiburg im Breisgau

Freiburg is often called “Germany’s greenest city”. While this typically refers to its status as an eco-living leader — with abundant solar power, electric buses, extensive bike lanes, vegan ice cream shops, and so on — the town is also very green, as in the color. To the east, the tree-covered hillsides of the Black Forest Nature Park provide a backdrop for a town dotted with public and private gardens and tree-lined streets.

Snaking through the town are shallow, water-filled channels. Added sometime around the 12th century, they provided water to the city and were used to fight fires. Now, they are one of the town’s most distinctive features. You’ll often see children sailing little wooden boats down the miniature canals. Local superstition states that, if you accidentally step in one of many channels, you’ll soon marry a local.

Freiburger Münster, the town’s central cathedral, towers over the skyline. Constructed around 1200, it was one of the few downtown survivors from heavy Allied bombing in WWII. It also provides a striking stage for the expansive daily market that fills the square around its base. Unlike many markets in picturesque small towns, this one is for locals first, and boasts a wide selection of local fruits and vegetables. Around the square, rebuilt and restored buildings give the town center a medieval feel, even if some buildings are a decades rather than centuries old.

Taken together, all this makes Freiburg quite a lovely and livable city. We spent our first couple days just exploring these sights and sampling the excellent local food. A few personal favorites included coffee and cake at Dattler which overlooks Freiburg, the botanical gardens, and regular stops for ice cream from Die Eismanufaktur.

Hiking Feldburg Mountain

The beautiful weather and distant mountains encouraged us to get outside the city a bit. So, on a cool Sunday morning, we set off for Feldburg, the tallest mountain in Germany outside the Alps. In the winter, it is a popular ski resort, but in the summer the slopes are free of snow and open to hikers. Clouds had rolled in that morning, and we spent the first hour of our hike on in a bright windswept haze, relentlessly trudging our way up. As we reached the top, the sun burned through the clouds, opening stunning views across the mountains and surrounding Black Forest.

The wind continued unabated, so we quickly ate our snacks and debated which route to take back to the car park. We’d noticed a number of signs for mountain huts on our way up, so we elected to find the closest one on our way down. With dreams of cake and beer, we started off. On the way, we passed a herd of cows, calmly grazing on a sharp slope more than 1000 meters up. As we rounded a bend, the mountain hut, more a small restaurant, came into view. And we were not disappointed. Soon, we were drinking cold beer and eating a hearty warm potato soup, all while gazing at alpine views from the comfort of St. Wilhemer Hütte. My first love will always be hiking to alpine lakes in the Pacific Northwest, but capping a hike with a cold beer in a warm mountain hut isn’t far behind.

Off to Colmar

While I’d heard of Alsace, it never formed more vague images of wineries and old villages. When I started planning our journey, I learned more about the area’s unique character, having been traded (often through conflict) between France and various German states for nearly three centuries.

If you do a web search for Alsace, you’ll see dozens of charmingly colorful, timber-framed buildings, bordered by flowers, and often situated on small canals. Many of these are of Colmar, a stunningly beautiful town at the edge of the Vosges, a range of low mountains in Eastern France. And the town does not disappoint. The most picturesque canals form an area called Petit Venice, which is just as beautiful (if not more-so) than its larger cousin in Italy. Strolling through the winding streets is a real joy.

Then, of course, there’s the food and wine. Called the “Capital of Alsatian wine”, Colmar is home to dozens of wine-tasting rooms and excellent restaurants. A visit to the area is worth it for the food alone, but when coupled with its charming scenery, it makes the town something quite unique.

Alsace

What makes the Alsace truly special though is not just Colmar, but the many smaller villages which dot the rolling hills. In the race for “France’s most beautiful village” (which is literally a competition, called “Les Plus Beaux Villages de France“), the rivalry is tough, but several recent honors have gone to villages in Alsace. With a car, they are all easily accessible from Colmar, with some of the most beautiful a mere half hour away. Here are a few standouts we visited:

Eguisheim

This 2013 “most beautiful” winner is located just south of Colmar. A tight ring road surrounds a warren of narrow, winding streets, with the Château Saint-Léon and an exquisite small chapel in the middle. High overhead, storks silently glide over the village. As one of the symbols of Alsace, they’ve been given prime real estate, with numerous perches built on church spires and building tops. We arrived early in the morning, and had much of the town nearly to ourselves and the locals for the first few hours. I’ll long remember sitting in the quaint center of town eating one of the finest croissants I’ve ever tasted.

Keysersberg

Nestled on the slopes of the Vosges mountains, Keysersberg (another award winner), was originally a fortress. Although nearly as beautiful as Eguisheim, Keysersberg’s other draw is the 800-year old Château du Schlossberg. A short walk up from the center of town, the castle offers panoramic views of the village just below and the surrounding vineyards beyond.

Ribeauvillé

Just north of Keysersberg is Ribeauvillé. When we arrived, there were more tourists, and cars cut through the middle of town, which breaks the majestic spell a bit. Nonetheless, the little circle in the middle of town is a gem, and well worth a visit.

The real draw for us was the Trois Châteaux (Three Castles), a hiking trail that leads up to, you guessed it, the ruins of three 13th-century castles. The hike was a proper one, with a decent grade and, on a hot day, requires some modest effort. As you hike up, the Rhine river valley spreads below, and ancient ruins loom above. It all feels snatched out of story book. On arriving at the castle, you can explore the various ruins and climb to the of the main tower, which offers one of the best views in all Alsace.

Strasbourg

Our last stop was Strasbourg, the capital and largest city of the Grand Est region of France. After the idyllic little villages, I expected the return to a “big noisy city” would be a bit of a let down. Instead, we were quite surprised with Strasbourg. While certainly a lot larger, it is not overwhelmingly so. And it is quite beautiful too.

We stayed in Strasbourg’s historic city centre, the Grande Île, an island with the region’s typical timber-framed buildings, narrow streets, and capped with the city’s cathedral. And what a cathedral. Goethe referred to it as a “sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God”. Standing at the cathedral’s base, in the broad, open square, it is easy to share his same awe. From the observation deck, 330 steps up a narrow spiral staircase, you see all of Strasbourg below and the Vosges mountains in the distance. Beyond its height, the amount and quality of Gothic detail is staggering. The monumental stature is continued inside, which is beautiful in its surprising elegance.

The pup of Strasbourg Cathedral

There are little, wonderfully human-scale details in the cathedral as well. In the 15th century, one of the great popular preachers, Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg, would come to preach at the cathedral. Legend has it, that during his long, earnest sermons, his loyal dog would lay down and fall asleep next to him. When a pulpit was built to honor Strasbourg’s favorite preacher, the artists carved a small dog, which, to this day, remains in repose, sleeping beside his former master.

Of course, there’s much more to do in Strasbourg than traipse through the cathedral. One favorite of ours was walking along the banks of the River Il, which guides you around the city and offers lovely views. It is also a prime picnic spot, and many of the city’s residences park themselves there with a bottle of wine and cigarette on a hot summer afternoon.

Another highlight was walking along Rue des Juifs. Formerly the center of the city’s Jewish quarter (hence the name, “Street of the Jews”), it is now lined with chic boutiques and modern restaurants. A particular gem was the restaurant Les Chauvins. Here, they offer modern takes on traditional Alsatian cuisine. Nearly everything they serve is, quite proudly, from Alsace. One of the few exceptions is a part of the wine list, which is from Chile, but notably produced by a family from Alsace. We ended up having a wonderful chat with the chef, who rightly takes pride in sharing the best of Alsace.

Our last stop in Strasbourg was Petit France, a historic quarter of half-timbered houses and cascading canals. While it was beautiful, it was quite busy, and we were getting into the first hot days of the summer. The stifling heat quickly drove us back to our air-conditioned apartment, so I’d hesitate to say we were able to enjoy ourselves. Ultimately, our two days in Strasbourg probably weren’t enough and I hope to visit again.

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First, in the terminal, navigate to the Sketch app plugin folder:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.bohemiancoding.sketch3/Plugins

Then delete your plugin. If it is a file, use the command:

rm YOUR-FILE-NAME

If it is a folder, use this command:

rm -R YOUR-FOLDER-NAME

Once you’ve deleted the plugin from the plugin folder, you need to recreate the symlink using this command:

cd ~/Desktop/Projects/Sketch/YourPluginDirectory && ./node_modules/.bin/skpm-link

The first path is wherever your build directory is located, and is relative to your /Users/ folder, while the second should be . If you get an error saying “No such file or directory”, then the path to your build directory is wrong.

I found this fix on this GitHub thread: https://github.com/BohemianCoding/SketchAPI/issues/193

Landing an apartment and settling in

In my last report, we were still in corporate housing, namely a hotel in a Berlin suburb. After a pretty brief search, we landed on an apartment at the Northern edge of the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood.

Our new neighborhood is dominated by blocks of 5-story apartment buildings, most constructed in the early 1900s. Originally built for factory workers, these blocks were dark, crowded, and cheap. This area was largely spared allied bombing during the war, making it one of the few neighborhoods where you can get a sense of pre-war Berlin. After the war, this was East Berlin, and largely neglected by the GDR authorities and their grand plans to reshape the city. With the fall of the Berlin wall, Prenzlauer Berg became known for its counter-culture movement, and many of the buildings were home to artists and squatters. Now, with rapid gentrification, high rents have pushed out most artists (and, sadly, many native Berliners), while chic restaurants, bustling cafes, and trendy boutiques have moved in.

This was the area we were most interested in, so we were happy to land this apartment. It is smaller than our Seattle place (as expected), on the ground floor, and faces an internal courtyard. This makes it very quiet, one of our main requirements after seven years in construction-mad Seattle. While it gets less direct sun than we’d prefer, it means the temperature stays wonderfully moderate, an unexpected blessing in this unseasonably hot Berlin summer.

Despite our (relatively) high rent, the first few weeks in our apartment felt more like squatting than living. With most of our household goods on a ship somewhere on the Atlantic, we were using a cardboard box for our dinner table and sleeping on an air mattress. Since apartments in Europe, and especially old ones like ours, lack build-in closets, our few possessions were stacked in piles on the floor. Many apartments in Berlin don’t even include build-in kitchens but, thankfully, ours did. However, we still needed to buy a refrigerator and washing machine. After many trips to our local Ikea (once the largest in the world), several large Amazon.de orders, and a generous loan of furniture from a friend, we now have a places to sit and eat, wash our clothes, and store our stuff.

Also, since I was pushing for this move over Daniela’s initial reticence, my offer included a promise that she’d get some nice furniture out of this adventure. So, we’ve been scouring online stores and local vintage shops for a few higher-end pieces. Germany is, after all, home to the Bauhaus, and a stone’s throw from the promised-land of Scandinavian design. After a small snafu with a local vintage dealer, we landed a gorgeous mid-century sideboard at a generous discount. Coupled with our new, and rather stylish sofa and rug combo, our apartment feels like it is finally coming together.

Now, we sit in wait for our shipment from America. With it comes our bed (and a reprieve from our air mattress), kitchen pots and pans, a dining room table, and the comfort of knowing the last major step of our move will be complete.

Other updates

German classes: Within a couple weeks of arriving in Berlin, Daniela found, enrolled, and started her intensive German classes. And they mean it when they say “intensive”. For three hours a day, 5 days a week, she’s fully immersed in learning and practicing German. Then, after that, there’s a good two hours of homework that evening. She found the first few weeks exhausting and occasionally frustrating, as the sheer amount of focus and effort proved mentally taxing. But, through an excellent teacher and dedicated effort, she’s acclimating and gaining a grasp on good portions of the language. While I’ve learned practically no German in the last two months, Daniela has progressed from A1.2 to starting her first B1 class in July.

Smoking: If there is a single thing that I dislike about Berlin, it is how much people smoke here. It is difficult to find things positive to say about American healthcare, but here’s one: anti-smoking efforts have been impressively effective at curbing cigarettes (at least in coastal cities). Berlin? Not so much. While you’re not allowed to smoke inside public spaces and our lease stipulates no smoking, smoking on the street or outside restaurants, cafes, and bars is very prevalent. Considering how otherwise health-conscious people seem to be here (organic food is everywhere, many people regularly exercise, and so on), it is disappointing that this incredibly unhealthy habit persists.

Exploring Berlin: Although most of our weekends have been full of apartment-related tasks, we have spent some time exploring our new home. A few highlights were trips to many biergartens, walking around the Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg neighborhoods, and sampling nearby restaurants. With luck, once our apartment is more settled, we’ll have more time to do some further exploration (and I’ll have more time to share our experiences here).

I’ve written up some learnings from our move so, if you’re interested in a similar adventure, you can avoid making the same mistakes we did. I broke this down into two posts: Logistics and learnings and Selling (almost) everything.

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Then we started on our move to Germany, and I learned what a real move is like, which I’m sharing here. This won’t be a comprehensive guide (there are plenty of those), but rather a few of our specific experiences and learnings from the start of our trek across the world.

Getting started

After I accepted an offer with Amazon Berlin, my next choice was what sort of relocation package I would take. Basically, I could take a lump sum and handle the move myself, or take a smaller payment and get more relocation support. Since I’d never done anything like this before, it was an easy choice: less money, but more help.

Choosing the supported move made everything significantly easier. The relocation company (Graebel) helped organize the moving companies in Seattle (Ace Relocation) and Berlin. They also arranged all the transport, necessary paperwork for customs, and provided guidance on what is allowed in international shipments. While I probably could have figured everything on my own, it would have taken longer and caused many gray hairs.

Prepping for moving

With a move date and the initial logistics set, we then had to actually get everything ready for the big move. To ensure we had plenty of time to get everything done (and there was a lot), we started our preparations several months before our move date.

With our relocation, we were allotted two shipments: one by air, and one by sea. The air shipment takes about a month to arrive, but is small (about the size of two washing machines). The sea shipment is a full shipping crate (like you see on trailer trucks), but takes nearly two months. We also had our suitcases and whatever we could carry on our flight from Seattle to Berlin. With this in mind, we set about deciding what to take, and selling or giving away everything else (this was a project on its own, befitted its own post).

Since there’s ample information on moving, and each move is unique, I’ll just share four small tips, and one big recommendation, from our move.

Here are the small ones:

1. Start early: It is tough to know how things will sell. Some will take awhile, some will go really quick. You don’t want to be doing a fire-sale in your last few days. This will be stressful and you’ll be forced to sell for less than you’d prefer. At the same time, think about the things you’ll really want toward the very end. We kept a few chairs and our table up to the final week since we didn’t want to spend weeks eating dinner on the floor.
2. Know what cannot be shipped: There are a variety of items our shipping company won’t take. Some of these are obvious, such as explosives or live animals. Others less so and more annoying. For example, they wouldn’t take most oils, which ruled out lots of beauty products. Also, no food products, so we weren’t able to do the big Costco run we planned or ship a ton of our dog’s specialty food.
3. Don’t take appliances: If you’re moving from the US to Europe, there’s a decent chance your appliances won’t work with the different voltage. You can get plug adapters (and we bought a bunch) for lights and dual-voltage electronics, but if the appliance draws a lot of power, you’ll need a converter. These are big, ugly, and expensive. Instead, we gave our appliances to family in case we want them when (or if) we return.
4. In the last few days, give friends your food: Because we lived in Seattle, we were required to buy an assortment of fancy, boutique, and bourgeoisie food products. Throwing away any food is a waste, but throwing away this stuff would have been a travesty. Thankfully, we had several friends pop-by in our last few days to say goodbye. What they didn’t expect was that they’d leave with half of a specialty grocery store in their car. So thank you Jen, Kate, and Lauren for keeping quality food out of the trash bin.

And, lastly, here’s the really big recommendation:

Spend quality time deciding what you want in each stage of your move and pack your luggage, air shipment, and sea shipment accordingly.

While in Seattle, we created three groups of stuff: for our luggage, air shipment, and sea shipment. These roughly sync with each phase of the move: luggage for the corporate hotel in the first month, the air shipment for the first month in our apartment, and then the final sea shipment with everything else. Unfortunately, in the rush, we didn’t think enough about what we’d need for each phase of our move.

Here are a few examples of what I wished I’d done:

• Taking pet accessories in our luggage: There were several things we sorely missed while in our long-term corporate hotel, namely pet food and kitty litter (since we arrived on a holiday weekend when nearly every store was closed), my cat’s automatic feeder (which prevents her from waking us up at the first light of dawn), and external phone batteries (because we were constantly killing our phone batteries while out and about). I would have gladly traded some of the clothes we brought for these items.
• Packing some kitchen contents in our air shipment: We expected to take most of our kitchen contents in our air shipment. Unfortunately, we significantly over-estimated what would fit in air cargo and only learned our error during the hectic move-day. So, in haste (and error), we elected to take mostly clothes in the air crate and put all the kitchen contents in the sea shipment. Because of this, we had more than enough clothes, but had to buy a small, cheap set of plates, utensils, and one pot from Ikea while we waited for our sea shipment. The result? Nearly a month of pasta since that was about all we could make with one pot.
• Not taking our bed? When we first moved to Seattle, we purchased a very nice mattress (one of my best purchases ever). Naturally, we figured we’d then bring this to Berlin. Unfortunately, this meant that we were sleeping on an air mattress for nearly a month while we waited for our bed to slowly traverse the United States, the Atlantic Ocean, and German customs. When we finally received our bed, I was truly thankful to have it. At the same time? I wonder if I should have sold it in Seattle and gotten a new bed in Berlin on day one.

Naturally, many of these learnings were unique to our situation. However, if we’d sat down and written down the things we might want for each portion of our transition, I think we would have been a lot more comfortable through each phase.

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What to bring, what to sell

The audit

We first started with an audit of our apartment. We went room by room and logged nearly everything we owned in a Google spreadsheet. For each room we created a new worksheet sheet, and added a line for each item or group of items (say DVDs or clothes). Then we gave each item a plan: taking with us, selling, donating, or giving to family/friends. Lastly, we noted a priority for each one. High priority were things that we didn’t use regularly and would probably be slow to sell or give away (such as my old grill). These were tackled first.

Getting things listed

With our list of items to sell, the next step was to get the listings written. I started another spreadsheet, this time in Notion (one of my favorite new tools). My wife and I divided up the task of writing titles, descriptions, and taking photos. Then we’d list the item, and note its status (listed, pending, or sold). It was handy to divide up the list between us so we wouldn’t have to coordinate all the offers, or inadvertently sell the same thing to two people.

Making the sale

This involved a lot of messaging back and forth with potential buyers, which got pretty tiring. One handy trick, if someone stops by to pick something up, also mention other things you are selling (and potentially offer a discount, since this will save you effort). A very nice gentleman picking up our grill also left with my wife’s used computer. In the end, we probably made a few thousand dollars, which was nice to help fund our move expenses.

OfferUp vs Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist

We listed everything on all three marketplaces, but had pretty different experiences with each.

OfferUp worked well for visibility, logistics, and payment, especially the integrated payment system (though OfferUp take’s a percent). On the negative side, you often get absurd low-ball offers or crazy requests to meet an hour’s drive away for a $10 item. I just ignored these.

Facebook Marketplace also provided good visibility and led to sales. One annoying thing: potential buyers can click a button to ask “Is this still available?”. Since this is so easy to do, you could get dozens of of people asking this, most of whom never reply again. This can get pretty farcical, and very annoying when you respond to inquiries only to have no reply.

As for Craigslist? My small sample suggests it is on its way out. We received far more offers and closed more sales via OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace.

Selling our car

We loved our Mazda 3, and it was probably the hardest thing to part with. Thankfully, selling it wasn’t too stressful. Initially, we debated doing a private sale or selling it to a dealer. However, after reading up private sales and experiencing how annoying it was to sell, say, a $50 end-table, we elected to go the dealer route. We knew dealer offers would be quite a bit below a private sale, but the reduced stress and effort made it worth the difference.

Step 1 – Assess the value

The first step is to get the Kelly’s Blue Book (KBB) report, so you’ll have a baseline price of what to expect. When filling in the wear and tear section, be pretty honest with the severity of scratches or damage so you get an accurate price. KBB will assign a quality level, such as Poor, Good, or Excellent. Read the criteria for their assignment carefully. You’ll also get a few price estimates, including what you’d get in a private sale and what a dealer will likely offer (which will be hundreds to thousands less).

Step 2 – Get Quotes

Then, go talk to dealers. I called about a dozen dealers and scheduled times to look at the car. Over the course of one weekend, we drove to half the car dealers in the Seattle area. Since our car was in good shape, I focused primarily on new car dealers rather than the potentially dodgy used car outfits, mostly to reduce the hassle. The results were interesting. A couple dealers were rude and gave us insultingly low offers. Thankfully, most were very nice, and would just give us an offer on the low end of the KBB estimate.

Step 3 – Negotiate

Remember when I said to focus on the KBB rating? Here’s where this is important. Your offer will be largely based on the quality level of your car. A “Fair” will get you several thousand less than a “Good”. Obviously, the dealer will rate the quality lower to pay you less. Fortunately, KBB provides a nice description of what each level means. Most dealers rated our car as “Fair”, which includes body scratches (yup, thanks Seattle) and light rust on the frame (absolutely not). When negotiating, I’d refer to the KBB description to argue that our car was definitely better than “Fair” and in most cases the dealer would pull a new quote based on the higher “Good” rating.

In the end, nearly every dealer converged around the same price, which was just above the mid-point of the KBB estimate. While we really liked several dealers (especially Everett Mazda and Kirkland Volkswagen), we chose to go with University Mazda, where we’ve been servicing our car for nearly 7 years. Terry didn’t try to low-ball us by saying our car was “Fair” and was thorough in walking us through his valuation.

Step 4 – Close the sale

This was the easiest step. We took the car in, Terry looked over it briefly, had us sign a half dozen pieces of paperwork, and cut us a check. In total, everything took about 20 minutes. We said goodbye to our faithful Mazda, called a Lyft, and were off to the bank to cash the check.

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Until then, here’s a few things that shaped our initial impressions of Berlin.

The Food

If you like good food, you’re going to like Berlin. And if you prefer your food cheap and diverse, then you’ll love Berlin. From our corner bakery (where they’ve been churning out fresh bread for more than 100 years), to newly launched Thai-German-French-etc. fusion restaurants, to the ubiquitous doner kebab, there’s easily something for everyone. And, I’d wager, the food is cheaper than any major city in Europe, and definitely cheaper than Seattle. Almost everything here costs less and tastes better, whether it is a delectable €5 bottle of Italian wine, a heavenly €2.5 glass of German beer, or a €2 block of French cheese that would easily set you back $15 at Whole Foods.

There are certainly exceptions, which can be surprising if you’re not careful. In the US, for example, water at restaurants is either tap water or fairly affordable mineral water. Here? There’s a good chance that sparkling water will cost more than your beer or wine. We were trying to figure out why a recent meal was so expensive, only to realize we’d spent nearly €10 on one bottle of sparkling water.

Public transit

There is no good way to say it: compared to most first-world countries, public transit in the United States is almost universally terrible. So it really isn’t fair to compare transit in Berlin to, say, Seattle. But I’m going to anyway. Transit here is so incredibly comprehensive, that there’s barely a part of the city you cannot reach via a clean, well-run, and frequent train, tram, or bus. Seattle? Not so much. Want to head to the outskirts for a picnic at the lake? Jump on the M4 to Weißensee. Fancy a stroll through the Tiergarten? Take the U-ban. Yes, all this takes more time than driving about suburban USA, but on transit you can relax, read a book, and destroy the environment a little bit less.

Welcome home. Here’s a thousand things to do

Ok, maybe not a thousand, but it’s a lot. Visiting somewhere, even for an extended stay, is very different than taking up residence in a new country. In the past three weeks I’ve gotten health insurance, a tax number, social security number, an apartment, insurance for the apartment, two bank accounts, four phone plans (more on that later), a city registration, transit passes, and likely more things I’ve already forgotten. I’ve done all of these before in the US, but never all at once. Oh, and most of this was in German too, which I don’t yet understand (thank you Google Translate).

English? “Ehh, a little”

While you can get pretty far not knowing German in Berlin, there will be plenty of times where your mono-lingualism hits its limit. Many Germans in Berlin are modest about their English. They’ll say they only speak “a little”, and then replying in fluent, expressive prose that would make an English-teacher envious. But just as many locals will mean it, so you’re reduced to nodding a lot, smiling inanely, and more Google Translate. Daniela has started her language classes, and I expect to start soon. Fortunately, everyone has been surprisingly kind and patient with our muddled butchering of their language.

Graffiti, everywhere

When they say “Berlin isn’t like the rest of Germany”, this is certainly part of what people are talking about. Graffiti is everywhere.

Holiday shopping

No doubt, you’ve likely heard that Europeans take their work-life balance quite seriously, piling on vacation days and closing shops on Sunday and holidays. I can affirm this is very much the truth, especially in Catholic Germany. We arrived in Berlin on Easter Weekend. In the US, Easter (like most holidays) is mostly an excuse for stores to pump profits with sale prices and kitchy, seasonal products. Here in Berlin? It is a four day weekend, and most shops (including grocery stores) are closed.

Most stores are closed on Sunday too, so better plan your weekend shopping. I’ve heard rumors that there is one Sunday a month where stores are open, but no one can tell me when it actually is. A few locals knowingly inform me that this shopping Sunday is, in fact, a myth to tease Americans.

And even when shops are open, their hours are perplexing to an American used to malls that open at the crack of dawn and close later than bars. Our local pet shop, for example, is open from 11 to 2, then 3 to 5. And don’t think that hour break is for lunch. My wife recently visited at noon and they were proudly “zum Mittagessen” (out to lunch).

Shops and more shops

Don’t let these “restrictions” on shopping lead you to think that Berlin is some anti-retail socialist paradise. Quite the opposite. The city is teeming with shops of all sorts, from cheap dollar-store places to the highest-end clothing, and everything in-between. My favorite? Nearly every block has a “Blumen” (flower) shop, adding wonderful splashes of color across the city. This is probably what American cities looked like many decades ago, with thousands of independent shops dotting the streets. The hollowing out of American urban retail, which started with suburban flight and was finished by Amazon and Walmart, seems to have spared Berlin (so far).

Over the next few months I’ll share more about our apartment hunt, finding a job in Berlin, and more.

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These past few days are the culmination of months of research, planning, job interviews, plenty of stress, and a dream to live abroad. Over the next few weeks, months, and years, I plan to share our expat experience, mostly for our family and friends, but also to inspire (and maybe caution) the random people who happen across my blog. I expect some of these posts will be more contemplative, while others will focus on the day-to-day practicalities.

If you’d like to get email updates on our European adventures, sign-up here:

Why move?

So why did we decide to upend our lives and move five thousand miles away to a new country? Well, many reasons. I suppose the best way to break it down is where we started, namely Seattle, and our destination, Berlin.

Leaving Seattle

I vividly remember the my first few hours in Seattle. On a beautifully sunny day in September 2011, Daniela (my then girlfriend and now wife) picked me up from Seattle-Tacoma airport in our brand new car. With the sunroof open, I leaned back in the seat and took in the expansive blue skies and stunning views of the Cascade mountains. That day started more than seven years of exploring my new city, hiking the trails of the Pacific Northwest, making new friends, marrying my wonderful wife, and so many other events that have shaped my life.

As I changed , so did Seattle. When we moved into our apartment in South Lake Union, our neighbors were warehouses, construction offices, and the other businesses that typically set up shop in low rent areas. We set our couch facing the window so we could enjoy our views of the Space Needle and Olympic Mountains beyond.

A handful of Amazon buildings had also recently opened nearby, a herald of what was to come. The rest of the story is well known. Amazon’s explosive growth dramatically changed Seattle, and especially our neighborhood. Instead of low rents, South Lake Union soon topped the charts for the highest year-over-year rent increases of any neighborhood in the US. And it stayed at the top for several years in a row. Our view of the Cascades became a view of another apartment building, and we turned our couch to the TV.

I’m certainly not one to say all of this growth is bad, or that Amazon “ruined” Seattle. As with most change, the real story is mixed. The growth brought new people to the city, many of whom I was privileged to call friends. It also brought choking traffic onto over-burdened roads. Friends were able to start new and thriving businesses, supported largely by transplants brought by Amazon. As rents spiked, homelessness, fueled by the opioid epidemic, grew worse. Tents popped up blocks from swanky new restaurants. There was good with the bad.

Our thinking was also influenced by reflecting on where the United States is headed. Some recent health challenges (largely resolved, thankfully) exposed us to the absurdities of the American health-care system. The cost of our excessive consumerism is also rarely discussed. And the less said about Washington DC, the better. So, there isn’t one reason we’re leaving, and no single issue was unmanageable. Taken together though, they make up the reason we fell out of love with Seattle and why we chose to move.

Moving to Berlin

On to our destination. I’ve always wanted to live abroad, but I was never sure where. In my student days, I assumed it would be Asia or South America, somewhere cheap, befitting my limited income. Exploring the Pacific Northwest quieted that voice, but it never really went away. A recent business trip took me through Amsterdam, so I took a few days to explore, booking an AirBnB just outside the center of town. It on was a quiet tree-lined road. Every morning, a bakery flooded the street with the smell of freshly baked pastries. Tucked into the corner at the end of the road, the local cafe came alive each evening.

But the best part was how accessible life in Amsterdam felt. When you stay in a hotel, it is tough to get a sense of real life. You’re in this artificial bubble, something that will never be a home. In my AirBnB, I rented a spare room from Misak, a chef at a local restaurant. I did my laundry in his compact washer/dryer combo. It took ages. And we talked about living in Amsterdam, what he paid for rent (not cheap, but not all that much worse than Seattle). That was the seed.

Back in Seattle, I told Daniela about my stay. She was wary but interested, so I promised we’d do a European adventure so she could get a taste of what I’d experienced. During that trip, we stayed with a photographer in Amsterdam, a developer in Copenhagen, friends in Brussels, and had a flat to ourselves in Berlin.

While we loved each city, there was something about Berlin. Daniela studied in Austria and her mother is German, so aspects of the city and its culture felt familiar. Only a few days in, she remarked it felt oddly like “home”. I felt it too (even through the haze of a nasty cold which leveled both of us for days). Perhaps it was the many parks, lively cafes, efficient public transit, vibrant arts scene, or diverse residents.

Or maybe it was something completely intangible, perhaps even fate. As I lay on the sofa, my head throbbing from the cold, an email popped into my inbox. It was from a recruiter, hiring for a design role in Berlin, a company literally blocks from our apartment. After returning to the US, and several rounds of video interviews, they invited me back to Berlin for the final round. While I didn’t get the role, it made this idea of moving abroad seem so much more tangible and well within my reach.

In a future post, I’ll share more about how I made it happen, from scouting companies to prepping for remote interviews.

What’s next

We are landing in Amsterdam, our first layover, in a couple hours. Then, one more flight, a short drive to our hotel, and we’ll be “home” in our new city. I imagine we’ll take a shower, play with our pets, and then sit quietly to reflect on how much our lives have changed in fewer than a couple days. Then, we’ll go out, get some food, and start writing our next chapter.

And we’ll probably be in bed by 6PM. Ah, Jetlag.

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For the recent WordPress Seattle Developer Meetup, I gave a short introduction and overview of Gutenberg. I highlighted how it works, noted some of the issues with it, and shared how to create your first Gutenberg block (based on the Gutenberg Handbook examples).

To check out my introduction to Gutenberg:

• Download the presentation (Keynote, 62mb)
• Download the example plugin code (ZIP, 3kb)