One Year In

Today was my one-year anniversary at Joyent.

I'd worked at MLB for 9 years prior to that, and when I resigned, I literally cried. I loved that job, and my friends there, but I knew that I'd finished what I'd set out to do there, and learned all I could in that position. I needed a new challenge; otherwise I'd spend the next 20 years there, stagnant. In a place where people love the subject matter, on a team where people rarely quit, a bit of a logjam had formed. Sometimes it felt like I was impeding (or competeting with) guys -- some of whom I'd hired from my last gig, guys who'd been my coworkers for a decade. Fortunately, an amazing opportunity came up for me, and I have an amazing wife who encouraged me to make the leap.

The new job, and this past year, have been hard. I tell my parents it's like being back in school. I learn ten things every day, am surrounded by people who're smarter than me, and I'm always up against a delivery deadline. I asked for a new challenge... I certainly got what I asked for.

So, first year review: I don't love everything about California. I don't love everything about working my ass off week-in and week-out. But I do love what I'm helping build at Joyent. I signed up to work with some superstars in the technology arena I'd already been a fan of -- since I started, most most of the rest of the Sun Microsystems dream-team have made the same decision I did, just a few months later.

Tonight, I helped respond to and debug a problem on production systems, running a revolutionary service platform. But what's friggin' awesome is that that platform was written by the guy next to my office, and running on the operating system that we compiled a few weeks ago, that had new features in it that I'd specifically requested. And among the folks using the best introspection tools in the world to analyze the problem were those tools' inventor, along with the guy who literally wrote the book on it.

During the post-mortem, I unwound and chatted with the new crop of co-workers. This time, though it was an online chat, and many of the co-workers were in another country. Still, though, I'm building things again that scare and excite me, and it feels pretty good.