The copyright headers were a travel diary

When I create a file, I stamp it: author, copyright, and a Created: line with the exact time and the place where I'm sitting. I picked up the habit early and never dropped it. No tool asked for the city. It doesn't compile to anything. It was just true, so I wrote it down.

For the first seven years the headers say only Copyright (c) 2009, Inikoo — no geography. Then, in October 2015, a few weeks after the afternoon in Singapore when Aurora began, the first place appears:

Created:  10 October 2015 at 18:27:24 CEST, Mijas Costa, Sain

"Sain". I was writing a basket module for the e-commerce front end and misspelled the country I was living in. That typo is my favourite line in the codebase, because it proves everything else: these headers were typed live, one at a time, by a person in a hurry — not generated from a template.

The route

Read chronologically, roughly nine hundred dated, placed headers draw a map:

• Mijas Costa, Spain — the first placed header, October 2015, and the recurring home base for years after.
• Sheffield, UK — from November 2015 (Created: 21 November 2015 at 14:41:00 GMT, Sheffield UK on the API entry point) through 2017. The business ran from Yorkshire; a lot of Aurora was written there.
• Bangkok and Phuket, Thailand — around same time.
• Macau, December 2015 and Penang, January 2016 — short stops, each leaving a file or two behind. The Macau files are tax-region billing tables; wherever I was, the work was the work.
• Yiwu, China — March to November 2016. Yiwu is the wholesale-market city where the products came from; the image-handling tables were written there, between supplier visits.
• Bali — Lovina, Ubud, Kuta, Sanur, Legian, from April 2016 with return trips for years. The agent and warehouse-location classes carry Balinese datelines.
• Mexico City, May 2017 — two headers on the same day, 09:21 and 22:06, a full working day in CdMx. One of them is the public storefront's 404 page.
• Tokyo, September 2018 — one file, created at 23:17. Some cities you only get one evening in.
• Kuala Lumpur and Cyberjaya, Malaysia — the biggest cluster by far, 2016 through 2022. If Aurora has a second home town after Sheffield, it's KL.
• Back to Mijas Costa — densely from late 2019, through at least April 2022.

And three headers weren't written in any city at all:

Created:  19 August 2017 at 15:31:19 GMT+5:30, Flight Delhi India to Bangkok

Others say "Plane Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia" and "Plane (Hangzhou - Kuala Lumpur)". An orders table, written in seat-back-tray posture, somewhere over the Bay of Bengal.

Metadata as memoir

The internet had just invented a word for working like this — the "digital nomad" movement got its websites and hashtags around 2014 — but I wasn't following a movement. I had suppliers in China, a warehouse in Sheffield, and a laptop that didn't care which country the coffee was in. The headers weren't documenting a lifestyle. They were documenting files. The lifestyle is just what falls out when you read two thousand of them in date order.

That's the thing I'd tell any developer working alone: write down more than the tools ask for. Version control remembers what changed and when. The header remembered where, and eighteen years later that's the difference between a git log and a diary. The misspellings — "Sain", "Malaydia", "Sheffied", "Indonesioa" — cost nothing at the time and now they're the watermark that makes the whole record credible.

The habit didn't stop with Aurora. The files in aiku carry the same headers — the class that renders this very blog post was stamped Created: Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:30:00 Malaysia Time, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ten years after the first placed header, still writing, still in KL, still writing it down.