59° North Family

Hello, we are Asep Bagja and Retno Ika!

We’re a couple from Indonesia, and currently living in Tallinn, Estonia! We met in 2012 (it still feels like YESTERDAY, though!) and spent our years freelancing, building tech startups, doing a nomadic lifestyle and everything in between. Our relationship’s always involve creative makings, photos, musics and tech!

Asep took a bachelor’s degree in economics but never worked in that area. Fell in love with programming since high school, he took a non-traditional route for his career as a software developer. Currently, he works at an Estonian company, building immigration tech to move aliens to Europe! He couldn’t stay away from music and still produce music albums in his spare time. By combining his skills, he creates albums for generative music and releases them on some music streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify.

And for me (hi, this is Retno. I run almost all the stuff around here), I went a bit traditional career for a while. I graduated from information technology and took jobs at several tech startups in Indonesia. But after almost ten years in tech, in 2018 I quit my tech job and became fully freelancing and building our tech startup (we quit them too in 2021, after the biggest hit caused by the COVID-19 pandemic). After that, I realised that I don’t want to continue my tech career any longer. I want to pursue my love of filmmaking, education and nature—that’s why I ask Asep to create our YouTube channel, to document our new journey in life.

We ended up relocating to Estonia in the Autumn of 2021, after dreaming of it since 2017. It has been a life-changing experience for us, and we embraced it with open minds. And now here we are, creating this blog to share our experiences—real stories of the ebb and flow of our lives—from the place we dearly love and call them home.