Whew. It’s been a busy year.

Last year at this time, my wife and I were getting married at the court house in San Jose. We also started on our plans to move to Amsterdam, a little scheme that we hatched back in 2020. I took a month to prep for interviews, and started the interview process with Booking.com.

I didn’t realize at the time, but due to the timezone, headcount issues, and generally slower cadence that this process would end up taking months. I started in early April 2023 and didn’t have an offer in hand until June 2023. Most of the delay was due to some last minute headcount shuffling, delaying my team-matching until much later. I was slightly worried as I had heard stories of Google hires that got a tentative offer, but due to recruiter layoffs ended up stuck in team-match for months.

For instance, I had my first hiring manager interview at the end of May a few days before our big wedding ceremony in Kansas. I was informed some weeks later that I was their top pick for the role, but two last minute internal transfers filled up the available slots on the team.

We attended my friend Charlie’s wedding the week after in Denver, and finally got back to our home in California to decompress. I was reassured that they wanted to hire me, but they were still looking for a team with an open senior level role. Eventually, I had to just stop checking my email obsessively and focus on closing out my remaining projects on the Search team at LinkedIn.

In July, I could finally publicly announce that I’d be joining Booking.com which was a huge relief. Especially after we had been telling relatives and friends that we were planning to move in late 2023 for the past year.

In September we celebrated Cassady’s birthday in Solvang, taking a much needed week to decompress out at my aunt’s new ranch. Kind of a last hurrah for southern California. It was beautiful, but I certainly don’t miss driving on the highway out there.

I put in my two weeks at LinkedIn, and we started really buckling down on selling anything we weren’t going to bring to Amsterdam. Our old place was suitable, although it was a bit old. Too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, with cheap flooring and aging fixtures. There was a lot of psychic energy in that house.

The weeks leading up to the movers arrival were tough, we couldn’t cook as much as we wanted, and we had to say goodbye to a lot of our dear friends in the bay. We had a bunch of cheap furniture that we didn’t want to bring with us, so we sold all of it. We had a coffee table that I bought at Goodwill for $20 when I first moved in, so it was fitting that I took it back to the same Goodwill and donated it again.

The movers came and boxed up what remained of our lives. All our cherished possessions carried away on a big truck, bound for a voyage across the Atlantic. We spent the final days before our flight at a hotel near SFO, nervous but excited. Our cat Bandit would be coming with us on the 10 hour flight and we were most concerned about her well being in the cabin. Fortunately she made it through, but we didn’t get any sleep on the flight over.

It’s been a few weeks since we landed. We’ve since found our new apartment, and I’ve just started at Booking. It’s crazy to look back at photos from even a few weeks ago, to see our old apartment in tact, then in boxes, then completely empty. Overall, that anxiety has melted away, and been replaced with optimism and excitement. For our new city, my new job, and our next chapter together.

We’ll definitely be spending the rest of this year taking some much needed rest. And I hope you will also get to take some time to relax as the year winds down. I’ll be getting up to speed in my new role and hopefully publishing some more pieces here. My drafts section is getting super full, but none are quite ready for publshing yet.

⧠