Well we’ve been back in the States for a month now, and I’m finally sitting down to write a blog post reflecting on our experience spending the last year and a half living in Slovakia. It was a bold move, one which mostly confounded friends and family, but which paid immense dividends, both in terms of personal and professional growth. I called it my “sabbatical year,” even though I really didn’t stop working. What I did, though, was to go independent, working freelance for an international developer training company, while residing in a country where the cost of living was substantially lower and the pace of life significantly slower than the one I had been leading in Southern California. Although I probably could have pulled it off, I decided not to take a pure non-working sabbatical, as I had from 1998-2000 when I first lived in Slovakia. At that time, I swore off technology of all sorts and spent my days immersed in Slovak language, culture and society. In the process I gained a new understanding of what was most important in life, namely, building strong friendships and helping others. Having had a large student loan payment, I eventually had to find work (training developers at Siemens), but my goal at that time was to rest from the intense labors of the previous 6 years and reorient the priorities of my life. And I was successful in this endeavor, the fruit of which was meeting the love of my life and returning with her to marry and live back in Southern California.
But after having worked another 6 years, mostly as a principal developer for the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, and after having spent countless hours in establishing a non-profit corporation, it looked like I needed another break, a sabbatical. However, this time the goal would be different. This time, I had a family to support, and I needed to revamp my professional life. Rather than simply taking a break from work, what I needed to do was transition into a new career and restructure my life to allow more time for the things that really mattered and, in particular, to be able to be present with my wife and son during the day. I realized that, after having spent the past 6 years working a nine-to-six job with an hour commute each way, which basically meant I was out of the house from 7 am to 7 pm, I was not able to spend enough time with my spouse to establish a foundation for marital and family life that would take us through the long haul. And it wasn’t just the time away from home. Most of the time, I would come home from work so depleted all I wanted to do was zone-out in front of the tube, lacking the energy to engage other human beings. The weekends were spent mostly running errands and maintaining the house. After 6 years of this existence, I had to ask myself the question, “Is this what life is really all about?”
In Eastern Europe they have no concept of what it means to be customer service oriented. For example, when I walk into a travel agency in Bratislava or Kosice, the two largest cities in Slovakia, the person behind the counter is angry and resentful that I entered the establishment. In one case, I was even told to leave and go to another agency, because my coming in the store meant that the travel agent would have actually have to do some work! And, while that sounds utterly ludicrous to American ears, it makes perfect sense to Slovaks with whom I’ve shared the story. In a society that was based on Communism for 50 years, where people could not be dismissed except for criminal activity, and where good performance is frowned upon because you’re making your co-workers look bad, customers are generally looked upon as an annoyance rather than as an opportunity to increase business. That’s because in a socialist society, where incentives for hard work are lacking, people have no motivation to go the extra mile to satisfy a customer.
If you’ve at all paid attention to much of the buzz surrounding Visual Studio code-named Orcas (available now in 
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