Portland, here we come!

Tomorrow, my family leaves on a four day trip to begin a new life in Portland, OR, as the Engineering Manager at real-estate startup www.cozy.co. I am incredibly excited to join the company for all sorts of reasons (the role, product, team, founders, location, pretty much everything). It’ll also allow me to focus on what I’m most passionate about: engineering and development management. So there should be fertile topics for new blog posts, though I suspect the purely engineering or Python-centric posts will get fewer (except for goless, which I plan to maintain).

Now for the heavy stuff. In addition to a new chapter opening, several chapters are finally closing. Since deciding to leave Iceland earlier this year, life has been a depressing adventure. After a promising start at CCP Atlanta, the studio was shut down. This caused us to become homeless. We were 2 days from closing on a house (for which we lost a very large amount of earnest money). So a few days later we drove to Austin and moved in with my in-laws for about 2 months. I found a new job at The Foundry, but I ended up not enjoying working remotely. I was looking for a new job just a few weeks after starting (the job was just for a 3 month contract so they were aware I was looking). We left my in-laws mid-June and moved into their lake house, which I describe as 30 minutes outside of nowhere (over an hour into Austin). We haven’t had running water for weeks due to pump-house problems. My wife and son have gotten cabin fever, unable to make friends with a culture we don’t seem very compatible with. I haven’t been able to give a concise answer to “where I live” or “where I work” since March. Moving costs keep building. My son is behind on his vaccinations due to moving around. It’s been the most difficult time of our lives.

And oh my god is it hot outside.

So here’s to a new job, a new city, a new start. See you on the other side!