Dave’s Personal Blog

It’s been a while since my last post here. It’s been busy. I’ve been busy with life & all that. I’ve been getting back into the iPhoneOS development, especially in light of the iPad announcement, and I’ve started a cooking/foodie blog at daveastels.com.

In my last post I listed my wants for a place in San Francisco. In a delightful twist of irony, a friend posted that she was looking for a new roommate. I joked with her that is was, indeed, somewhat amusing that we posted what were essentially mirror posts on the same day. I thought little more of this until a mutual friend suggested that we seriously consider sharing her place. A week later and I’d started moving in.

Things are going great. The neighborhood rocks: BART, MUNI, corner green grocers, convenience/liquor store, coffee shops, taquerias, and even a gourmet ice cream shop. All within an easy walk. The condo is fabulous. The roommate is incredible. Did I mention that I have a 26 minute door to door commute now!

So… I’m getting really tired of commuting up the peninsula daily. It’s a drag and worse on weekends. Pretty much all my friends are in the city. So… I need to move my ass up there. I figure I’ll see if I can leverage the collective power of my SF peeps. Here’s what I’m looking for:

• kitchen:
  • granite counters and lots of them
  • gas range
  • microwave optional and really, even not wanted
• nice-ish neighborhood
• convenient for public transit and biking to/from SOMA
• nice view
• new & modern
• a bit of counter in the bathroom
• generous wall space for my desk & bookcases
• moderate sized living/dining area
• roomy bedroom
• laundry in unit or even in building

About 800 sq.ft. seems to be what I’m after (I’m in a 770 sq.ft. place now… and don’t really want to downsize).

Price is somewhat open. <=2000/mth preferably. One caveat is that there can’t be a credit check, as I have no US credit history… being on a cash-only basis since I moved here. I’ve been fucked over by that little detail at the last minute once already.

I don’t know if I can get what I want at the price I want in S.F. I know I can in Chicago, but I also know the cost of living difference.

I’m pleased, tickled, elated, excited, and just plain happy to announce that I’ve decided to join the kick-ass folks at Engine Yard. Their focus is on-demand deployment and management of Ruby on Rails applications on Amazon EC2. They’re movers & shakers in the Ruby & Rails worlds (Engine Yard are the folks behind Merb & Rubinius, and are heavily involved in Rails).

I’ve had a mostly fun year & a half or so at Google. I met some cool people, who I will miss, and had some great food, which I will also miss (JC, both of those apply to you).

The reason for the change is that Google wasn’t taking my career where I wanted it to go. I took Chad Fowler’s words to heart (which were something I’ve tried to follow but sometimes get distracted from) “What would you rather be doing?“

I decided that what I’d rather be doing was: writing code, in Ruby, with awesome people, while contributing to the Ruby community, writing, and speaking. Being able to do all that in San Francisco… bonus.

So, here begins a new chapter in my career.

Thanks for all the well wishings & congrats from folks.

I’m pleased to announce that a good friend of mine has agreed to join me on this blog.

Jerry was one of the leading players at the FNM where I took my first MTG steps away from the kitchen table. That was a couple years ago, and as I got to know him, I watched him develop into an accomplished player, learning a lot in the process.

Welcome Jerry! I’m sure we’ll all learn plenty from your posts.

George Carlin passed away last week.

The world is suddenly a less funny and more politically correct place. He will be missed.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday in Sri Lanka.  He is one of a handful of authors I remember vividly and fondly from my childhood & teen years of reading one scifi novel after another. See An appreciation of Arthur C. Clarke on the Official Google Blog.

You got it.  Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Steve Jobs isn’t the only one who can quote Dylan.

… speaking of Steve Jobs and changin’ times… I may be bumping into Mr. Jobs at the local Cupertino Starbucks before long…

Next month I’m heading to California… Silicon Valley to be specific.

After over 3 years of saying “I’m not interested” to Google, I’ve accepted their offer of a position. I’m not sure how public I can be yet about what exactly I’ll be doing… but it will leverage my experience and expertise in Agile Development, TDD, Ruby, Rails, and RSpec.

This change is not without some sacrifices, but we think it’s the right move at this time. One downside is having to end my association with Obtiva… which I have greatly enjoyed. They’re great people and great to work with.

One benefit is that I won’t be having to focus so much on billable hours to cover the bills anymore… so there should be more time for things like RSpec and writing.

It’s been a long time since I blogged. It’s a long story, but things were rough until April… getting screwed over by a client. We ended up getting some money from them in the end, and I’ve hooked up loosely with a shop run by quality people that I know well enough to trust. Since then, I’ve been keeping as busy as I can handle with building web-apps in Rails. So things are going better.

To kick off what will hopefully be a new lease on life for this blog, we’re switching things around. First is a new look. That’s partly just visual, and partly due to switching from Typo back to WordPress (which has come a long way since we switched away from it). Some things are working, some are not (like the tag cloud ). So bear with me as things get finessed into shape here. 

Update: the tag links work now.

Wow… it’s the end of October again. A year ago we were in the process of buying our house. Now we’re close to our second Yule here.

We did a family pumpkin carving tonight, the results of which you can see in this post.

Other than that, the occasion has pretty much snuck up on us, busy as we are with finishing up a client project and readying to launch a service to fill a conspicuous gap. More on that later.

All of us TextMate users got a Halloween treat when we got to our desks this morning (assuming we have auto update set). The splash screen and application icon are the wicked jack-o-lantern you see to the right, while the “no file loaded” background was a nice cobweb. Nice to see the TextMate folks have a good sense of fun… all the more reason to use their kick-ass product. See Allan’s post here.