Changes in My Life
So what have I been up to lately?
To say that my life has been changing a lot lately would be the understatement of the year. A year ago at this time, I was living in Madison, WI, working for a traditional company and getting ready to move out and start my own business. Six months ago, I was picking up the pieces after my cofounder and I decided to close down our business and move on with our lives. And just two months ago I was in the middle of a draining but productive job search that had me take 10 onsite interviews on both coasts in three weeks - I do plan on writing about how I prepped for those interviews in a post soon. Although by the end of it I never wanted to see the Denver airport again, I was lucky to walk out with 8 amazing offers. Every company I got an offer from I would’ve loved to work for but unfortunately I couldn’t pick more than one.
After a long and difficult deliberation, I decided to take Google’s Software Engineer offer and I started last month. I decided to stay in the Bay Area since I had an established friend group here and I felt comfortable with Google and it’s culture and felt like I had unfinished business there after my internship.
And I’ve been extremely pleased with what I’ve been doing there. I’m working on the Text To Speech component of Android and I’ve been extremely impressed by both the quality of Google’s infrastructure and the caliber of the people that I work with. They represent some of the most intelligent engineers and people I’ve met. And I can already see the improvement of my software engineering skills in my own personal projects. Of course, my job and Google aren’t perfect (no jobs are) but I’ve been a big fan so far!
Like I mentioned, the position did require relocation to the Bay Area, something I was very excited to do. This time around I decided to learn from my mistakes where it comes to housing. When I moved to Madison, I wanted to move into a place on my first day and so had to pick an apartment based primarily on online listings. I did fly out to Madison to look at places before I moved in but it’s really hard to get a feel for a place based on internet pictures and a one hour tour, much less get a feel for the area it’s in. I ended up really liking my place in Madison but hating where my apartment was located inside the complex - next to the pool - and disliking that the apartment was closer to UW’s campus than it seemed. So this time I managed to find some temporary housing that would give me a month and change to look around and figure out what I wanted. My primary wants coming in were a nice place close to work, close to the local amusement park - side note: if you’re interested in my theme park goings-on, check out the coaster specific portion of my site - and an extra room, loft or den so I could have a home office, a place to put all of my tech equipment and a separate room to work on my side projects. After doing some research online and finding a preliminary list of places in my price range that checked all of my boxes, I took the first few weekends of my stay here to look at places. And after some searching I found an awesome place in West San Jose/East Santa Clara that checked off all my boxes. I’ve been here for a few weeks and I love it so far!
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. Now that I’m settled in, expect to hear from me a lot more. I have big plans for this blog - and my coaster blog - that hopefully will come to fruition this time around! Regardless, thanks for checking back with this site and you’ll be hearing more from me soon!