Six months in Vietname

Andi P. — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:19:28 +0000

Hello DEV. First post here, so I keep it short.

I am originally from Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia. Since earlier this year I am living and working in Hai Phong, Vietnam. A few people asked me about this on other places, so I write it once here.

Why Hai Phong and not Hanoi or Saigon

Everyone goes to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Hai Phong is quieter, closer to the coast, and the cost of living is much lower. For someone working remote and paid in USD this makes a big difference. Also the food is very good and nobody talks about it enough.

The internet is better than I expected

This was my main worry. Fibre here is cheap and stable — I get around 200 Mbps for less than 10 USD a month. Only problem is the power cuts in summer, so a UPS is not optional. I learned that the hard way in July when I lost about two hours of work.

Working hours

Vietnam and Indonesia are same time zone (UTC+7), so nothing changed for me there. This was one reason I chose Vietnam over Thailand or Philippines.

Coworking

I tried a few places in the city centre. Most are fine but I ended up just working from home, it is cheaper and quieter. Cafes here will let you sit for hours with one coffee, which is nice but not good for concentration.

Still figuring things out. If anyone else is working remote from Vietnam, would be good to hear from you.

I mostly write small Python things, some of it is on my GitHub if you want to look — nothing serious, just tools I use myself. https://github.com/riptide99614

Rebuilding my dotfiles after moving to Hải Phòng

Andi P. — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:34:19 +0000

Finally got properly settled in Hải Phòng a few months ago — new apartment, new desk, new everything. The one thing that always takes longest to feel like home is the terminal. Fresh machine, and suddenly none of my muscle memory works because half my aliases are gone.

So this weekend I sat down and rebuilt my dotfiles from scratch, and cleaned them up while I was at it. Posting the useful bits here, partly so future-me has a copy, partly in case anyone finds a shortcut worth stealing.

Nothing exotic — just a .bashrc, a .gitconfig, and a couple of helper functions I use every day. Full versions live in my dotfiles repo on GitHub if you want the lot.

---- history ----

stop bash forgetting things the moment I need them

HISTSIZE=50000
HISTFILESIZE=100000
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups # no dupes, no leading-space commands
shopt -s histappend # append, don't overwrite, on exit
PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' # write after every command, not just logout

---- quality of life ----

shopt -s checkwinsize # keep $LINES/$COLUMNS right after resizing
shopt -s cdspell # fix small typos in cd paths
shopt -s autocd 2>/dev/null || true # type a dir name, cd into it

---- prompt: user@host, cwd, git branch, all on one line ----

parse_git_branch() {
git branch 2>/dev/null | sed -n 's/^* (.*)/ (\1)/p'
}
PS1='[\e[32m]\u@\h[\e[0m]:[\e[34m]\w[\e[33m]$(parse_git_branch)[\e[0m]\$ '

---- aliases ----

alias ll='ls -lah'
alias la='ls -A'
alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ports='ss -tulpn'
alias myip='curl -s ifconfig.me; echo'
alias serve='python3 -m http.server 8000'

---- timezone sanity ----

server logs are UTC, I am not. this one line has saved me

more debugging pain than anything else in this file.

export TZ='Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh' # UTC+7

DEV Community: Andi P.