jayroe

On January 18th, one year from the day I started at Perpetual, I got an email from my once and future manager, Craig. Earthlink had a position open that seemed to be a good fit both professionally and family-wise. Doin’ it tha East Bay Way was starting to take its toll as we struggled with how to raise a family in the most expensive city in the US sans NYC. Earthlink flew me down to Pasadena for some informal interviews with the team I would be working with… if I got the job.

While there I got to hang with my good friend Brian, who’s Kevin Smith ambush is worth a read. After the interviews, I flew back to San Francisco to wait for the call. For someone who picked up the family and moved from Mississippi to San Francisco in 2006 it felt like everything hit slow motion. The possibilty of slamming everything back in a truck to move to the other side of the continent was utterly exhausting.

Only days later I accepted a Senior Software Engineer position with Earthlink in Atlanta. Arriving in our new apartment on March 1st and still tired from the first move across the country, we finally feel like we’re in a place we can call home. My wife and I both realized that we needed to go for something bigger than what Central Mississippi could offer. Moving to San Francisco was part of that effort, but it just didn’t feel right. Both growing up in Mississippi, we have always liked Atlanta: still in the South but a big city with all the accoutrements. Life is much less expensive here and family is much closer (no more air travel with an energetic 3 year old).

Notice some new threads on the old jayroe.com site? With stress levels and personal time returning to sane levels, I actually feel like working on personal projects again (Particle Sphere… I’m looking at you). To be sure, there are challenges here in the Dirty South and with my awesome new job, but at least it feels like home.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.