I am Sarah Brennan, and I have been living and working out of a rotating set of cities since March 2021. Right now that city is Edinburgh, which happens to be the one I grew up in, but I will get to that.
I started Digital Nomad Pack because I was tired of reading destination guides written by people who spent four days somewhere on a press trip and called it research. Every guide on this site is built from actual time lived in the city: finding a real apartment through the real local rental market, testing coworking spaces on an ordinary Tuesday rather than during a sponsored visit, working out the visa process by going through it myself rather than summarising someone else’s forum post. If a guide on this site tells you a coworking space has reliable internet, it is because I sat in it for a full working day and it did.
How This Started
Before any of this, I was a UX researcher at a mid-sized fintech company in London. I spent seven years there, and it was a genuinely good job by most measures: decent pay, interesting problems, a team I liked. What it was not was flexible, and by early 2021, working from my flat for the better part of a year, I had stopped being able to ignore a fairly obvious question: if the job did not actually require me to be in London, why was I still paying London rent to do it from a single room.
I left in March 2021. Not dramatically, not with a plan much more sophisticated than a laptop, a three-month sublet in Lisbon, and enough savings to fail without immediately panicking. Almost six years on, I am still doing some version of that, though the shape of it has changed considerably: more structure, better systems, a much clearer sense of what actually makes a city work as a base versus what just photographs well.
What I Actually Do
I split my time between client UX research and consulting work (the same discipline I built my career on, just done from wherever I currently am) and writing for this site. The two feed each other more than you might expect. Assessing whether a city works as a place to actually live and work is not so different from the research work I used to do assessing whether a product actually works for the people using it: you cannot answer it from a survey or a single visit, you have to watch how something behaves under normal, unglamorous, everyday conditions.
That is the standard I try to hold every guide on this site to. Cost of living numbers pulled from real rental listings and real restaurant menus, not three-year-old averages. Coworking recommendations based on spaces I have personally worked from. Visa information checked and rechecked, because immigration rules change constantly and an outdated guide is worse than no guide at all.
Where I Have Actually Lived
I do not keep an exact running count, mostly because “lived” is a slippery word once you have done this for a while, but the honest answer is somewhere in the range of a dozen cities across four continents since 2021, with stays ranging from six weeks to the better part of a year. Barcelona has been the longest single stretch, and the city I have written about most extensively on this site. Lisbon, where this whole thing started with a three-month sublet, was the first.
As of this year, I am based in Edinburgh, which is a different kind of base update than any I have written before, because it is the city I am from rather than a city I am discovering. I left at 23 for that London job and did not seriously consider moving back for eighteen years. I did not plan to move back now either; I flew home for my mum’s 70th birthday in June and simply did not book the return flight. I write about that decision, and what it has actually been like, in Sarah’s Current Base: Edinburgh, and the full practical breakdown of the city as a nomad destination is in the Edinburgh Nomad Guide.
I post a Current Base update whenever I move somewhere new or somewhere significant changes in a city I have already covered. It is the closest thing this site has to a diary, and it is where I say the things that do not fit neatly into a structured destination guide.
A Few Other Things About Me
I am an EDM fan, which shaped my opinion on more than one Spain-versus-Spain debate over the years. I am a genuinely enthusiastic hillwalker, a habit that predates the nomad life by decades and has quietly shaped where I have chosen to base myself more than once. I still think in UX research frameworks more than I probably should, which is why every guide on this site tends to end with an honest answer to “who is this actually right for,” rather than a generic sales pitch for the destination.
Get in Touch
If you have a question about a guide, a correction, or a city you think deserves coverage on this site, the contact page is the best way to reach me. I read everything, even if I cannot always reply quickly depending on which timezone I am currently arguing with.
Related: Sarah’s Current Base: Edinburgh | Edinburgh Nomad Guide | Barcelona Nomad Guide