I’ve written several of these “it’s been a while” posts in the lifetime of this site. This is yet another of those, except it has the distinction of being the post after the longest hiatus in my site’s history: 3 years, 5 months, and 18 days. So that’s something.
Yet again, my renewed interest in writing here again is heralded by a change in the architecture of the site, and this time, I’ve totally ditched Wordpress in favor of Octopress. I’ll post a retrospective on that later… for now, I should probably start with where I left off: interviewing for a job in Austin.
I got a job
So, “company A” turned out to be Bazaarvoice, and after a couple more rounds of interviews, they offered and I accepted my first job out of college. Looking back on it now, I had no idea how incredibly lucky I was, as I’ve not only been with them since, but the company has grown and flourished during a time of incredible economic downturn. I started on July 16th, 2008 as an “Implementation Engineer”, helping Bazaarvoice’s clients implement the BV solution on their websites. In November of 2010, I moved into a new role with the same title, but on a “SWAT team” of sorts that helps ensure that new features coming our of our Product Management and Development groups are ready for mass-consumption and by our clients and . In August of 2011, I was promoted to “Senior Implementation Engineer” on the same team. I’m coming up on 3.5 years at Bazaarvoice, and it seems pretty surreal.
I moved to Austin
Working at Bazaarvoice necessitated moving to Austin. So, on July 12th, I loaded up a U-Haul truck and moved from Abilene to Austin. Stephanie and a high school friend attending UT helped me move into my first apartment. Austin is an interesting city, and after living in the Dallas metro area (the “Metroplex”), Abilene, and now Austin, I can tell you that it’s better than Abilene for sure, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s better than the Metroplex. Austin definitely has a better restaurant scene, but Dallas and the surrounding areas have much better traffic infrastructure (roads and public transit)… not that good restaurants outweigh horrible traffic, but the verdict is still out.
I got married
On August 15th, 2009, I married my best friend and the love of my life, Stephanie Welch. I had asked her to marry me just 6 short months earlier, to which she obviously said “yes” (despite it being Friday the 13th of February). I honestly only remember bits and pieces of the wedding day, but I do know it was one of the happiest days of my life. We were married at my home church, First Baptist Church of Carrollton, we spent a couple nights in downtown Fort Worth, and we moved Stephanie to Austin just a couple days later. We went on our honeymoon a couple weeks later, which was nice because it gave us time to get Stephanie moved and settled into our apartment. Our honeymoon was a cruise on Royal Caribbean that sailed from Port Canaveral, Florida, and went to Labadee, Haiti; Ocho Rios, Jamaica; George Town, Grand Cayman; and Cozumel, Mexico before returning to Port Canaveral. … We’ve been married for a little over 2 years now!
Other stuff
Stephanie now works for Marsh USA, the country’s largest insurance broker, as a “certificate specialist”, processing insurance certificates. It’s not an incredibly exciting job, but I think it’s pretty much exactly what she was looking for.
I made my debut on national television via a CBS Evening News segment on Austin’s job market. The entire video is a good watch, but skip to around 0:55 to see yours truly.
In August of 2011, we adopted a pair of kittens; a brother and sister named Reginald and Romona. They are literally the sweetest kittens you’ll ever meet.
Today
That should bring you up to speed as far as major events and changes. I probably won’t post very often; I’ve never been good at doing that. What I will probably do though, is use this space for thoughts that I can’t fit in 140 characters over on Twitter (@jlgoolsbee). There have been several things recently that I’ve wanted to post about (through naturally, I can’t remember those things right now), but didn’t want to post on the old site because I didn’t feel like messing with it or posting one of these “catch up” posts. We’ll see how long I keep it up though.