The week I moved, quit my job, and got engaged

Here's what I did a couple of weeks ago:

• Monday: FHE
  
• Tuesday: stained glass class
• Wednesday: told my manager at Apple that I was quitting.
• Wednesday evening: Karren and I decided to get married(!!!).
• Friday: ring shopping.
• Saturday: moved from the apartment I've been at for a year and a half to a house.
• Also Saturday: bought the ring.
  

It was a pretty stressful week. :)

Moving

My current roommate and I moved from our cheap apartment to a really nice house that we're renting. It's way nicer (dishwasher! washer and dryer! granite counters! less than 10 years old! carpet! AC! a yard! heater that works! garage!), and actually slightly cheaper since we'll have four roommates instead of two. I really dislike moving, but this one was definitely worth it. I don't know why we didn't move earlier.

Quitting

I've been at Apple for about two years (if you count my internship, which I do, since I was doing the same work on the same team), and it's a great company to work for. They're releasing amazing products and doing very well financially. The people that I worked with were very smart. I worked on some really cool stuff.

"So why quit?", everyone asks. Unemployment is high, you have a great job at a great company, your career is really starting to take off, and you're leaving?

Yep!

Don't worry, though: I'm starting at Google a week from tomorrow. :)

I left for a few reasons:

• I'd like the option of moving from the Bay Area (like, if I ever wanted to buy a house), and Apple's only engineering offices are in Cupertino. Google has offices all over the world.
• Google has more rigorous engineering practices that I think will help me to become a better engineer.
• I identify more with Google's values.
• More freedom to work on different things. It's pretty easy to move from project to project, and I really like working on new things.
  
• Free lunch. :)
  

I still like Apple a lot, and I like their products. The decision was hard, but it felt right, and I hope that it works out well. I'm excited to start my new job in a week. (Since I'm sure people will ask, I have no idea what I'll be doing there. They interview people for a general "engineer" position, and assignment to a team happens right around the time that you start. Hopefully it will be something cool. :)

Engaging

Last, but definitely not least, I got engaged! Karren and I have been dating for almost a year, and we're getting married on October 9 in the Oakland LDS temple.

There was no proposal.

Seriously.

Sorry girls looking for a story to gush about; you'll have to look elsewhere.

We've been talking about marriage for several months, but it didn't feel right until a few weeks ago. Something changed, and we both quickly became confident that it was the right decision. We were talking one night a few weeks ago, and realized that we were going to get married. We never had a conversation early on where we decided that we were officially dating; we both just naturally knew that we were. Similarly, there was no official proposal when we decided that we were going to get married; we just naturally knew that we were.

I had no idea that wedding planning was so much work (or so expensive!), but it will all be over in five weeks, and then my wonderful girlfriend (and now wonderful fiancée) will become my wonderful wife! :)

I also made this

First the iPod shuffle, now this: Google announced Google Voice this week.

Google Voice evolved from Google's acquisition of GrandCentral in the middle of 2007. I was an intern on Google's telephony team at the time, and my small team handled the acquisition. While I was there, I helped integrate GrandCentral's technology into Google's systems. I worked with Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet, and Wesley Chan, the guys who made the announcement in Google's blog.

This post's title is a slight exaggeration, since Google Voice was just in its infant stages while I was at Google. I did help lay the foundation for phone-enabled applications at Google, but I can't really take much direct credit for Google Voice. My team certainly can, though. Nice job, guys!

Apple

It's official: I'll be an intern at Apple in the Bay Area this summer, working the iPod engineering team. I'm pretty excited about working at Apple and living in Silicon Valley.

I got internship offers from Google and Apple in early January, and I've spent the last two weeks thinking about which one I want to take. It hasn't been an easy decision. Google offered me an internship on the Android team working on their new mobile phone platform; Apple offered me a spot working on the iPod. Both were projects that I wanted to work on, and both were at great companies.

I had two primary focuses when looking for an internship for this summer:

• I wanted to work in Colorado or California, since those are places that I might want to live when I get a full-time job.
• I wanted to do embedded systems or hardware development since I've never done that type of work professionally.
  

My goal with internships has been to gain broad experience with companies, locations, and types of work so that I'll have a good idea of what I want when I choose a full-time job. It's hard to jump around to different jobs after you graduate, but internships offer a good opportunity to "try before you buy".

I waffled back and forth several times in the last two weeks about which offer I wanted to take. The job at Apple offers more experience with embedded systems, but the job at Google was on an exciting new project that I'm really interested in. The iPod is cool, but Android is poised to start a long-needed shakeup of the wireless handset market. Apple is a new company to work for, but I really liked what I saw at Google last summer. In the end, I went with Apple because the type of work there was a little closer to what I was looking for, and because I thought it would be good to see how another company works. I felt bad turning down Google's offer, but I think I made a good choice.

I'll miss Google's amazing free food this summer, but I'm excited to work in a fun place on a cool product at a company that's doing amazing things. It should be a fun ride.

Vint Cerf and Google Tech Talks

You know how Al Gore invented the internet? Well he didn't; Vint Cerf did, along with Bob Kahn. One of the things that he works on these days is the interplanetary internet--no joke.

One of the cool things about working at Google is that people like Vint also work there. Today he came to the Kirkland Washington office and talked to us (Kirkland Googlers) for about an hour. He talked a little bit about Google's plans to bid on the wireless spectrum that be auctioned soon, and he talked about the future of the internet. He didn't say anything revolutionary, but it was just cool to have one of the guys who created the internet standing in front of me.

Vint spoke at a Tech Talk. Google holds several tech talks at their offices all over the world each week, and all employees are invited attend in person or tune in via video conference to any that they are interested in. I'm taking advantage of the opportunity while I'm at Google. I've listened to Tech Talks on face recognition, Google Maps, a somewhat obscure programming language, details about how Google's search and ads systems work, among others. I also listened in when Ron Paul (one of the Republican presidential candidates) visited Google. All of the Tech Talks have been really interesting.

Google's philosophy is to make information universally available; in keeping with that, you can view many of the Tech Talks on Google Video.