A year of changes

Just one year ago, I was working for Sears Israel, living in Raanana and being generally happy with my life.

Since then I left my job, met, consulted and worked with a few awesome startups, and finally joined Microsoft and moved with my family to Redmond, WA.

And had a new baby.

So tons of things were going on, lets see if I can capture some thoughts on them:

Central Israel vs. Seattle suburbs

Life here on the “east-side” are much more relaxed. The amazingscenery, the very low honk/minutes-on-road ratio, switching from an 60 years old tiny apartment to a 20 years old house, cool, drizzly weather vs the hot and moist middle east. We do miss our families very much, but we also have much richer social lives here, with many friends, and plenty of play-dates and outdoor activities for the kids.

Startups vs. Corporate

I’ve been working with and for startups for many years now. The move to a ~100,000 strong company is a huge change. Half a year in, and I am still struggling to adapt to the big-company way of thinking. There is also a big sense of responsibility knowing that my work now will soon be affecting a serious amount of customers globally, a thing that in many cases in startup world is not entirely true.

Startups are also often times between financially promising, and money-down-the-drain. Microsoft is in business for many decades, and still manages to net tons of money every year, and every year do so more than the last one.

I also need to re-prove myself. When I was employed full-time in the past I was holding top positions such as Architect, Dev manager, and was offered a few VP R&D and CTO jobs. As a busy consulted, I way actually paid to come in and voice my opinions out loud. In corporate land I started much lower, and now need to work very hard to get my voice heard. Especially when I am surrounded with a really talented and experienced bunch of people. I see it as a challenge and as an opportunity to grow and learn. Being a Lion’s tail beats Wolf’s head almost any day of the year. And it is full of Lions around here.

One kid vs. two

Given W[n]<=>work required for n kids, and F[n]<=>fun gained from n kids, it is sad that

F[n+1] = F[n] * 2, while W[n+1] = W[n] 2

Totally worth it though.

Settling down It has been a heck of a year, with so many things to do that it kept me busy from engaging the OSS and dev community activities as I did in the past. I only gave two short tech presentations (on git and on NoSQL data stores), did very little OSS contributions, and wrote no blog posts for seven months! Now that the whirlwind slowed down, I find myself getting back to these things. I already have tons of things to write about, and a few session proposals to send out to conferences.

As far as this blog goes - the year of changes has just ended, and the year of new and exciting (at least for me) content begins. Stay tuned.