Three weeks ago today, a moving truck delivered all my possessions to our new house in Olympia, Washington.

Last week, I was informed that my employer was restructuring and my role had been eliminated. Once again, I’m available for hire.

Moving to Olympia

We started looking at Olympia as a possible place to raise a kid early this year. We visited and saw the children’s museum and tried to pick up the vibes of the city. I asked around on the internet.

I’d love to be able to explain succinctly and clearly why I moved. I can’t, really. We have a great set of friends in the Tri-Cities that we love and never thought we’d move away from. We had a life we were happy in.

But when we visited Olympia, we saw a different future for our kid, and we wanted it. We wanted it really badly.

We knew we were upending our whole lives. That we’d need to build social connections fresh for the first time in over a decade. We gathered our courage and decided to take on building something new.

We got the keys to the house in mid-April. Some maintenance of it had been neglected and the roof needed replaced, mold needed remediating, and other renovations needed to happen. After running CAT6 cable through our walls when we bought our first house in 2019, I swore I would never live in another house without it, so we hired someone to come take care of it. We hired painters to come paint. We drove the four hours between Olympia and the Tri-Cities a few times, but it all got done.

We wanted to stay in the Tri-Cities until after Lucas’ birthday in June. We didn’t want to celebrate alone, or surrounded by boxes.

But on June 19^th, we loaded everything on to a truck and drove across the mountains to come move in. On June 22^nd, the truck showed up and we unloaded everything.

And now we’re here. In a neighborhood that has gone out of its way to welcome us and be friendly. A neighborhood full of kids Lucas’ age who he can play with. Lucas has visited the children’s museum so many times and is excited to attend preschool there. We’ve gone to a large, well-organized, well-attended Pride festival and parade.

I can’t bring myself to regret any of our choices.

Getting Laid Off

Last Wednesday, while my parents were visiting to see our new house in our new city, I woke up to the email that I had been laid off.

I’ve never actually been laid off before.

I don’t want to say too much about the layoffs or the company, but the main thing is: we’re okay. Even though we’ve just moved, and we’re still in boxes, and still juggling furnishing the new house and getting some lingering maintenance done on it, and still trying to get the old house ready to sell, we’re okay.

Much like last time, I don’t really know what’s next. I’ll take a look around and see what’s available, see who’s hiring, and see if there’s anything out there for me.

I’ll probably start applying for jobs soon. I’ll probably work on some side projects that have been kicking around in the spaces around my job for the last decade, and if the job hunt isn’t going well for long enough, maybe I’ll take a stab at self-employment.

I don’t really know.

If you have a job opening and you think you could use a staff engineer who’s got almost fifteen years of expertise in Go, a lot of opinions on billing and auth and APIs and most things honestly, and who thrives when handed a problem and told to figure out how to make it go away, shoot me an email: hire@paddy.dev. You can find me on LinkedIn or just check out my standalone (very wordy) resume.