Exotic developing countries for the win!

I'm still having a hard time "getting" the whole "hacker city" question, which comes up every now and then and always ends up with SV / SF / CA as the only reasonable options.

If you're plannign on hacking away most of the time, possibly even bootstrapping product development, you need:

1. transport -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be out and about all the time
2. connectivity -- so-so is already good enough, you're not meant to be online all the time (since most of the time, its not research you're doing but distractions like HN)
3. inexpensive cost of living -- thats what really matters unless you made it big already! But then SV / SF / CA is a no-go.
4. "good" people -- they exist everywhere, just like the "bad" ones

Originally from Berlin (which is pretty friggin cool for a German city), I almost exclusively live as an Expat in Cairo, Egypt now, to combine drastically lowered costs with perpetual sunshine.

I highly recommend it. There's a small and very nice expat scene here, not much of a "hacker" scene. Well, it depends. I gather, like in other emerging economies, there's hundreds of thousands of people here in this 20 million metropolitan area who happily "hack" away on C++, C#, Java, basic web stuff. They just don't care much about Web 2.0 or Hacker News, Macs or even the whole "GNU hacker ethic" etc. They're "just" into programming (but then, isn't that "pure" interest more what we're looking for anyway?...) Sure, they all use pirated commercial rather than open source software and sure, many of them often work on outsourcing gigs found at rentacoder, but: it's not like there are no "hackers" here.

I don't need a huge social scene since I wanna get stuff done, not talk about it and I don't need a VC or angel scene since the only money I will ever take is that of paying customers. I don't trade futures, particularly not my own. Granted, I'll keep my German passport for setting up the formal company there at some point and I'll keep my German health insurance, too. I'll keep my German consulting clients and I'll keep paying taxes to the German state. But we're talking about locations to live-and-work here...

Now, what else do we have in store. A hugely different culture and a strongly religious one but if you don't speak the language, you don't get most of it anyway. It's a different pace of life that's fascinating to watch. Crackling infrastructure, although hey my ADSL has been up uninterruptedly for a couple of days now! Transport: depends. There's a vast oversupply of Really Cheap Taxis here, more than making up for the relative lack of a public transport system. Basically you can get wherever you want 24/7 at minimal costs. But I prefer biking which gets you through the perpetual jams more quickly and also that's the only exercise I get so I keep riding it. Get a mountain bike though, to cope not with mountains but with dirt and the quality of roads and pavements.

It all depends on your individual priorities. Mine were and are: climate, cost structures, cheap flight availability to mainland Europe (to Berlin from here: 4 hours and EUR 140!), peace and stability, low crime level and a certain basic safety. Smog, Islam, dust, pollution, noise and crowdedness I can live with, these aren't so high on my list of priorities.

I guess it's about making the trade-off that fits you personally. And I guess the equivalent for a US person would be some minor, warm Latin American country within cheap-flights reach that also is or is being kept peaceful.