Life in Denver March 2, 2008

As of yesterday I’ve been in Denver for 5 months. It seems like it’s only been a week… Getting here, from Ann Arbor Michigan, was by far the most stressful period of my life.

I had been working for Careersite since 2005 or so… maybe it was 2004. I got quite attached to the infrastructure we built for running the re-write of the old perl code to the Java based version. It was the first Sys Admin position I had that actually had to be concerned about high volume traffic and uptime for a website. I learned a ton from the smart people there, especially my boss Bruce Kohler. While everything was going fine and dandy, we read in the news that a massive number of newspapers signed a deal with Yahoo HotJobs. And sure enough, that meant our customers.

So the newspapers needed to keep Careersite running while they all migrated to HotJobs. They figured the best way to do that was to buy Careersite. Fortunately for me they thought I was one of the ones important enough to keep along with the software/hardware. I really had only two options: stay in Ann Arbor and pretty much be bored for about a year and then move on to another job or move to Denver and get involved with different projects along with keeping my precious Careersite servers. So, I chose Denver. I should mention that at the time when I made this decision my wife was about 8 months pregnant with our 3rd kid.

So over the next couple months: I got a new job, got a new son and moved some 1800 miles west to a strange and big city. Travis was just over a month old when we packed up our new minivan and headed west. I’ll never forget that nervous feeling of dread… Before this move I had never been further west than Illinois.

We blindly moved in to an Apartment in Aurora Colorado. We based it off of the bus routes and what looked like a good commute, the quality of the school system in the area, and how nice their website looked. We did all right. The schools require school of choice in order to actually get in to a good one, but we’re prepared for that now and our kids will be better off next school year. The apartment rocks, we even have an attached 1.5 car garage! And the commute gives me a nice break to/from work for reading and unwinding.

We’ve since found amazing sushi options, fun museums/zoos/etc for the kids, THE MOUNTAINS, good malls to drive to, and just this weekend we explored Boulder CO. The only thing I really miss now (besides family obviously) is Trader Joes. Why oh why won’t TJ come to Colorado?

The new company I work for, Indigio, couldn’t be a better fit for me. The people are funny and smart. I feel like I’m learning something every week. I’m almost always working on a project that interests me. And they really trust and respect my opinion.

Through Indigio I got addicted to blogging, so I’ve expanded now to a personal blog in addition to the company blog. I also have some really smart friends who I’m going to try to get to help contribute. I hope we’ll be able to make something that’ll make people want to return and leave a lot of feedback. I got addicted to the feedback from the company blog… always looking to learn something new.

I’m also a Dad, as I mentioned above, and Family is even more important to me than geek stuff. So I’m sure I’ll post about family life too.

Anyway, I should sleep.