new job!

It’s been ages since I last posted. I’ve been really, really busy. Just in the last three months I spent a week in Cancún, a week in San Diego (for HP), and, after almost three years at HP, I interviewed for and accepted a new job at Ancestry.

The position sounded great. I’d be managing a team of engineers in Ancestry’s Engineering Productivity group. The team’s goal is to write software and tools to automate everything the company does. I’ve now been at Ancestry for a little over two weeks, and so far it’s been a great move. It’s a great environment. They have a really nice cafeteria with good food, a great campus, and really smart engineers. Ancestry also gave me my first Apple product! They gave me a 15″ Retina Macbook Pro, 2.7Ghz quad core i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD and a 27″ Thunderbolt display. I can now use VMWare Fusion and run several VMs all at once. It’s nice to run a fully supported enterprise grade OS that has Unix underpinnings. I’d still prefer a Linux OS, but that’s not really practical in most companies, as they require apps (like Office/Outlook etc..) that will only run on either Mac or Windows. My travel won’t be quite so varied as it was at HP, but Ancestry does has a sizable engineering office in San Francisco, so I’m likely to spend a week there every two months or so.