Why Panama?

 A former colleague at a job long ago asked me: “Why Panama?”.

I thought i simply send a link to the blog post that explains it. But to my great surprise, i hadn’t written it yet! 😝

View from the terrace… 

Well, here we go…

I had only very few important criteria when considering retirement locations:

Warm, safe, affordable, tranquilo (my new favorite word), able to visit my parents relatively easily, availability of good food, availability of visa.

The southern US immediately disqualified, as it is NOT a safe place, with all the people running around with guns and using them. And it is way too expensive. Well, the political situation is also far from encouraging.

So, with that list in mind i checked out several other countries. 

Europe is too cold - i do not want to see snow ever again in my life - except on fotos.

Southern India would have been really nice! But, India has no visa. 

Dominican Republic is too loud - everybody and their grandmother has a huge boombox outside their door blasting anything they feel like into the air; and that at all kind of times night and day.

Tobago - where i had lived before for 4 years - is too expensive. I don’t want to spend all my savings on housing. So are most of the other small Caribbean islands. And the big ones have way to high a crime rate. 

Most of Africa and Middle East is politically too instable, or even in a war. So is Africa. I do not want to lose all my savings and have to start over again!

Thailand and surrounding countries have a language that is impossible for me to learn. 

Leaves northern South America and central America.

Most of the countries in that region are also politically rather instable or in some kind of civil war like unrest. 

Only Panama seems politically stable.

 It has visa regulations that are very conducive to immigrate. 

The real estate is quite affordable (you can get land for less than 10$/m2 [1$/sqft], and buy a good home for 150k [the one I’m building for example😝]). 

The language is close enough to english to be able to eventually learn it. 

The climate is awesom - you can choose your preferred temperature range by going higher up on the mountain or closer to the sea (at my land it rarely gets above 30C [86F] and rarely below 19C [64F]. 

I can grow much of my favorite food myself - the growing season is 12 months a year. Vegetables and local produce and products are quite affordable, too.

And, it is not much more costly to travel to Europe to visit my parents, than from the US. 

My land is at the end of an asphalted dead-end road that leads up the mountain. It’s very quiet here - muy tranquilo! 

Perftect!!!

Of course it has its downsides as well. But i can deal with and work around  those…

I have written about each of these items (good and bad) before in this blog. I hope you enjoy poking around… If there’s a question that isn’t addressed yet, please let me know, and I’ll write about my experiences and observations on that topic…

Reminiscing

I was always blessed with new ideas. Usually years before the “world was ready” for them. This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing, obviously, is that such ideas are exciting and fun to ponder. But, pondering alone never seemed sufficient for me, I always wanted to implement them, too!

I (choose to) believe, that “sending ideas” is one of the three ways the greater universe (or whatever you want to call whatever is outside of the physical system we live in - our universe) is influencing this system (our universe). I find it hard to believe that ideas just come from the neurons flying around my little, limited capacity brain… (Coincidences, and the fact that every person seems to have a passion, a topic that is very dear to their heart, are the other two outside influence I was able to observe (more on spiritual ideas, fulfilling live's purpose, and finding happiness here: toolOfTheUniverse.org).

The world seems to be functioning quite well as it is. But, then, there’s an idea that somebody receives. A foreign item. Something that wasn’t there as of yet. The system was operating without it. But now, as this person gets this idea, it is possible that it becomes part of this system. And the course of our world is forever changed. No matter in what little way… 

 



On the terrace of the home I’m building in Chiriquí the mason trying to lay tiles had the first tile slanted just a little - maybe 1 mm. Trying to keep all the other tiles level with this one, by the time his line reached the other end of the area 4m down the line, he ended up needing 4 cm of padding! Any little thing now can - and most often does - have a big impact later on! 

Ok, back to my ideas…

The wonderful thing about receiving ideas is that it’s exciting. The downside of it is, that if an idea is a bit farther out than the general population can appreciate, it’s hard to find somebody else who would partner in implementing this 

For example:

In the later part of the 80s I had the realization, that most of a relational database application - which most business application are still today - is made up of the same kind of program. The only difference in the various programs of any single type are the name of the table and the names and numbers of fields. There is also most often more or less of business logic for each of the tables, which differs a lot from one table to the other - but that is a comparably small portion.

So 35 years ago I implemented a first program generator. A program that writes the 4, 5 different types of programs needed for every table. It also linked the programs according to the relationships of the tables, created menus, and provided the hooks for business-logic, printing, and so forth.

That generator was the reason why Progress Software hired me in 93 - finally realizing my dream to move to the USA! Unfortunately, the new CTO, who started between my being hired and my actually starting with them, didn’t appreciate the idea - as was so often the case in my life… The project was cancelled, and I ended up working on something else…

BTW, Object Oriented Programming seems to be another approach to deal with the same problem: repetitive code. My experience is, though, that changing from procedural to object oriented approach did not make writing and maintaining programs easier at all. I’ve come to the conclusion, if you really want to create a mess, use object oriented programing! Without being very consistent in your naming of things and structuring your classes, a system becomes exponentially harder to maintain the bigger it gets. Larger system are virtually unmaintainable! At least those I encountered were so…

In the early 2010s I used the same approach as earlier on in my life to create a browser based application. I consider this application “my Mona Lisa”. After years of changing - not just the programs and DB structure, but even the whole focus of the application! - the system is still neat and consistent and super easy to maintain and expand! This application proves it is possible, it proves it is much less costly to build, and it proves to solve the typical problems systems are plagued with: hard to maintain, hard to extend, hard to adjust, hard for somebody new to understand and get into, high bug rate in code from get go and even higher once modified.

How is that possible? Estimated 80% of the code is generated and can easily be regenerated when there are DB structure changes. These programs are basically self-maintaining. The customized, manually written code is super-consistently following the same naming conventions and style as the generated code. That makes it very easy to understand, which in turn makes it easy to modify and extend.

I implemented this approach for procedural OpenEdge code. But, it can be used for any other language and many other styles of programming as well.

Personally, I don’t think we are able to deal with the complexities of the ever growing systems without the help of computers… computer programmed code is super consistent. Consistency makes life easier for not just people, but for computers as well…


Today, as I am retired from programming, I am working in a totally different area. But, I am, again, trying to implement ideas, new approaches.


I observed the architecture of homes in Panama. And it quickly became clear, there’s plenty of room for improvements!

The focus of local, Panamanian architecture is “cheap”. While it is fulfilling certain criteria well, there are tons of compromises about functionality and comfort. Too many for my liking!

For the foreigners, the architecture of northern areas is simply copied. There are problems in the north that simply don’t exist here - extreme temperatures is just the biggest of them. And there are problem here, that simply don’t exist in the north - super high humidity, just to name one of the biggies. Northern architecture provides solutions for northern problems. But not just NOT provide solutions for tropical problems, but even causes problems in tropical areas.

Using all the ideas and approaches I have encountered over the course of my life, adding my observations and experience living in a tropical climate, and - yet again, as usual - receiving many ideas, I am trying to create a home in Chiriquí that is comfortable and functional, affordable, makes use of and benefits from the local resources and climate, and deals with the local problems.

As if that is not exciting enough, it all is happening in a new, different language, and in an unfamiliar, different culture!

Despite being very busy and occupied by that big task, I’m trying to find the time to blog a little about it.
idea. 

My first house is taking shape already. So far, many of the ideas and approaches used are validated already! The topics of heat, humidity, type of foundation are just the biggest items on the list that are taken care of. Not by trying to fix the symptoms of the problems with the architecture by simply adding a/c, dehumidifier, and patching cracks in walls and floors. But, by having the appropriate basic architecture to deal with these problems from the get-go!

Even though it is not yet finished, I am about to put it on the market. I’m curious how it will be received by those who are coming to retire in Panama… For now, I enjoy my sunrises and sunsets on the big terrace overlooking the pastures with cows and the one or the other horse, and listening to the birds, the rushing of the water of the river bordering my land, and the sound of the rain on the roof when the afternoon showers arrive…

Two of the (to me) most amazing things of the nights here: the hundreds of lightning bugs in the surrounding fields create the flair of magic. And for the first time in over 40 years I am able to see the milky way again, due to the much lower light pollution around here, than  where I used to live in the US and Europe.