This is almost exactly what we are doing now but in Europe. We have done 8700miles over the last three months. We mostly free camps and have a very similar routine as you did. We have stayed in some amazing places. Currently in Lithuania. Poland Tomorow or Monday I think!
I lived in the van Monday-Thursday while working in London (my home is around 130miles to the east). Not a problem and not uncomfortable. I sometimes used the showers at the office but my van is fully equipped with shower,toilet heaters etc. I wasn't the only one doing it either, and after a while you spot other likely vans.
I'm currently living in a van! Me and my long term girlfriend have taken some time from the 9-5 to travel around Europe for a while. Been on the road for almost three months now and it's done wonders for my mental state.y mind is clearer, I'm calmer and I feel better. I'm still trying to work on small projects and I have an osx utility I wrote entirely on the road using my MacBook Pro and the solar panels on the van to power it.
It's not cheap, we are able to live on basically half of what we were living on before, but that's not the point of this journey for us.
As a note there are some apps that do this, and one I saw in offered some gaming elements to help you 'discover' the sights and information about them. Looked pretty cool but I don't know if they released it.
I was looking into an idea similar to this and I started looking at using open street map to generate map data to solve this issue. Open Street map db has tons of info that you don't see on the normal 'maps' so making custom maps was really the way to go. The idea being to download map 'packs' that contain sufficient detail to get to the areas of interest then more detailed maps only for those areas (to avoid having to download huge datasets before you travel and to make it possible to download new ones from wifi points while away)
This idea really interests me and as I am about to embark on long term travel I intend to explore these ideas more.
Not sure if I am allowed to post links but I posted a blog post on this subject recently http://www.blackspiral.co.uk/blog/ comparing Trello/Redmine/Jira. Have used all three on recent projects.
If you do check out the link, the blog isn't fully featured yet so please ignore that!
For Java work I use the debugger a lot. When working on my Django or Python projects I use it a lot as well since its built into PyCharm. When writing code in emacs etc I tend to not bother.
I also make heavy use of logging statements, but these are usually left in for debug builds and used to help find unexpected bugs rather than active debugging.
Just recently had to start using JavaScript so I have spent some times figuring out FireBug and its debugger. I must say I was pleasantly surprised that it works well.
Http://www.wanderingeurope.co.uk is our blog