Moving Home

For some time now, Katie and I have been planning to move to the Seattle area. It’s why we spent the past two summers apart with Katie interning up in Seattle to get a feel for the city and gain some contacts in the legal market here. We talked at length about where we had strong preferences to be and Seattle rose to the top of the list. I will miss the Bay Area and the friends I had from school and work a lot, but it came time to move on to something new. I know we will all keep in touch and I will make it a point to visit with them whenever I go down to the Bay Area.

I’m currently crashing with my parents, which has taken some adjustment. I had to throw out a bunch of old stuff accumulated from living in this house for 13 years to make space for the new stuff I moved up (mostly just clothes). Katie’s finishing up school in May next year and sometime between now and then we plan to buy a house, move everything from Oakland up to Seattle and have her commute down to finish up the last few weeks/months before she graduates. I try not to dwell on it, but being long distance again is going to be tough. Thankfully, we have our honeymoon coming up in a week and a half and Katie’s on winter break until mid-January, so we’ll get to spend a lot of time together over the next two months.

Staying in Mobile

When the economy started to tank back in September, I started to get a little nervous about my prospects for finding a job. I thought I would casually feel out the market and see what was interesting that was going on up in Seattle. I had some interesting discussions with a handful of the big companies and some startups up here and then I found something from T-Mobile out of the blue. The discussions progressed quickly and I broke my rule for scheduling on-site interviews on Fridays/Mondays to give myself extended weekends in Seattle and flew up mid-week to meet with T-Mobile. The interview went well and I was informed before I left that an offer would be coming. This was great news for me and put me at ease moving forward. Once the details were agreed upon, I ended up canceling my remaining interviews after doing some long thinking about what it was I wanted to do next.

Did I want another job? Or did I want a career? Lockheed could have been a career but I didn’t find myself enjoying the corporate culture there. Aplix was a job, not a career, from day one and I knew that. Combining that experience with what I did at 4thpass, I came to realize that I had some pretty unique experience in mobile that I could leverage into a career, the only remaining question was how passionate I still was about the mobile industry.

I had believed for a while that mobile was stagnating a bit. Yes, there was the iPhone, new Nokia phones, even the G1, but I felt like everything was moving toward some convergence of hardware features and there wasn’t a whole lot of innovation left once this convergence was achieved. Recently, I attended a Stanford/MIT VLAB talk addressing the future of mobile and was reminded of the impact of mobile on the emerging world. There was a presentation from an EIR at Kleiner Perkins where he detailed his experience tracking the use of mobile technology all over the world, particularly focused on second and third world countries. This really interested and excited me at the prospects of the leading markets (Japan, Europe, US) learning from the creativity of emerging markets in uses for mobile technology. It also reminded me that there is a lot yet to come in mobile and we’re really opening up a lot of possibilities and the hardware capabilities have matured to match what desktop computers were doing just a few years ago.

The open sourcing of a relevant, usable mobile software stack has changed the game I believe. While I’m not a huge fan of Google, or perhaps a fan at all, I do believe that their effort to move Android along and finally release Android as a platform for development signifies a tremendous shift in the mobile industry. We will see the long term effects of this and look back at the Open Handset Alliance and this effort as a watershed project for the industry. It is after arriving at this conclusion for myself that I felt like staying in mobile and, in particular, pursuing this T-Mobile opportunity made the most sense for me.

Some of you may know that I spent the better part of this past year pursuing an entrepreneurial venture. While that has been sidelined for now, I believe sometime down the road I will revisit trying to start my own thing. I learned more than I believe an MBA could ever teach me and I know at some point this will be a path for me to take but I have accepted that now is not the time. I plan to do as much as I can with my current opportunity and really see where it takes me. My friends here in Seattle know how seriously I’m taking this when they see me actually dressed to the nines for my job =)

What’s Next

So I joined T-Mobile USA as a Principal Architect working on next generation mobile platforms. I can’t really get into any more details than that, between the confidentiality agreement I signed with T-Mobile as a whole and the NDA specific to my project. I can say that I’m extremely excited about its prospects, what I will learn along the way and what influence I will be able to exercise over the direction of the project. The confluence of these pieces made the T-Mobile offer one I simply could not refuse. I’m also really happy to be putting my Master’s degree to full use now, as I’m heavily focused on all aspects of Software Engineering.

If anyone reading this is interested in working on Android for T-Mobile, please let me know. We are looking to build our team up and there are opportunities in Bellevue, WA, San Jose, CA and Richmond, VA.

The company was Replay Solutions and they have a product that claims to have a DVR-like capability for running software that makes it easier to detect, replay and fix bugs. Okay, I get it, they used an analogy to communicate what they do. But there’s a serious problem when someone with their interests in mind describes them as a DVR company. Seriously, that level of sophistication isn’t acceptable for Silicon Valley. I kindly replied to this individual, explaining that they have a misunderstanding of the company’s business and encouraged them to learn more about their product before acting in the company’s interest again. No response, go figure.