New City, New Job

It’s been a little while since I’ve written on here, and a lot has happened since then, so I figured I’d better make an update. The short version is that I moved to Austin and am now doing freelance work with some friends of mine. Now for the longer version…

Moving to Austin

My wife, Monica, is from Austin, and her family lives here, so we had been planning to eventually move to Austin for a long time. The question was always just when. The opportunity finally came this past October, when Monica started talking about finding another job. She had been working the night shift as an ICU nurse for almost a year and was really struggling with a poor sleep schedule—switching back-and-forth between being awake at night for work and being awake during the day for me and friends and family.

Her changing jobs seemed like our chance to move to Austin. So, after she quit her job in October, we put our house on the market and started looking for a place to live down here. We quickly found an apartment in central Austin and moved down at the start of December.

New Job

Shortly before we moved, a friend of mine, Caleb Sylvest, reached out to see if I would be interested in doing some Rails development for a client that he and his friend, Chase Hilbert, had been working with. I was still working with Oven Bits at the time, but I decided that with the move, it might be nice to also take a fresh start with a new job. I said yes. It was tough leaving my friends at Oven Bits, but it was made easier by the knowledge that I would be moving out of town and would be seeing them less either way. I started full-time with Chase and Caleb at the start of the new year, working contract for their company, Spacetime.

My first project with them was for a company called StudioHop, re-platforming their existing site off of a home-grown PHP framework to Ruby on Rails. I had a blast with the project, and we launched their new site at the end of January. We then started our next project with them, implementing a site redesign and adding a bunch of new features to their site, which we just launched at the end of March. I’m pretty proud of the result.

I’ve also been working with another great client during this time, Steadkey. We’re helping them build a tool to streamline the home-buying process and are in the process of rolling out an MVP of the product.

Wrapping up

In summary, I’m feeling fortunate to have good work with good friends and good clients, and I’m loving being in Austin!

If you have any development needs and are interested in working with me or Spacetime, or if you just want to say hi or even to send me hate mail, feel free to hit me up.

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