An offer of a Voluntary Exit from Google HR landed in my mailbox right around my ten-year anniversary with the company, give or take. We'd had a couple of packages like this at Google before (news), basically the same deal you'd get if you got laid off. But this was the first one put in front of those of us working in one of the revenue engines of the company — I worked on Search.

I wasn't aiming to leave. I liked the work, I had a good team and boss. But the package was enough to kickstart a discussion, "why not now?". My wife and I ran numbers and discussed our futures. I clicked the button. My last day as a Googler was earlier this week, October 4th.

I have good feelings about my time at Google. It was nice that I saw a some different parts of the business: some consumer (three years at YouTube, four years at Search) and some enterprise (three years at Cloud). I got to play with big infrastructure and solve some hard problems. I saw behind the curtain. But the best part was the smart and interesting people I got to work with. I know it's a cliche, but it's the truth.

Not everything was great. I've decided to not use this space for dishy stories about how Google isn't all it claims to be. But I sure do love reminiscing and grousing as much as any engineer. If you want to share war stories over a beer, I'm always up for that.

What's next? I haven't decided if this is retirement, or a sabbatical, or something else. I've been off work for extended stretches twice before, once by choice and once not. Those two times taught me that the difference between a wonderful, mind-expanding time and a stress-fest is my own mindset. And now that I haven't been really working for six weeks now, I can confidently say that my mindset is positive and good.

I'm excited about the next phase. I feel fortunate to have some time to focus on what's important.

The other day my daughter asked me about Software Engineering -- what do we actually do? She's eighteen and probably won't follow in my footsteps, which is fine, but I still want her to see my field.

I've always found this question hard to answer. I've been an engineering manager for a long time, and I'm happy to describe that job (emails, 1:1's, PRD reviews), but I don't think that's the heart of it. Plus these days I work for Google where things there are proprietary and deeply layered, not much help for answering questions like these.

Recently I've found my way to Mastodon for obvious reasons. I chose the Hachyderm instance because it was well run by people who shared my values. It turns out that the values of the owners and operators of the things we use matter, huh.

I then learned a cool thing, that the Hachyderm admins do much of their work publicly. They livestream debugging sessions on Twitch, they write postmortems, they share live graphs. @nova happened to be live-streaming at that moment, not surprising since the team's been busy absorbing thousands of new users and fending off attacks. My daughter and I watched a bit together.

Team Hachyderm (@nova @dma @quintessence @Taniwha @hazelweakly @malte): thank you for running this service well. But also thank you for giving me something I'm proud to use and proud to show my kid.

I'm excited to start my new job at YouTube in a few weeks. I'll manage the engineering team building the data warehouse for usage metrics.

I like that YouTube is important. It's firmly a part of our culture and I'm sure it will be how my kids watch video. YouTube's impressive statistics are the result. You don't see usage like that without a bunch of hard problems, and hard problems attract bright people. Indeed that's the clincher for why I'm looking forward to working there. People vote with their feet, and I have a lot of friends who have opted for Google, and YouTube specifically. They tell me that it's a great place to work.

YouTube is one of the worlds foremost platforms for social commentary, education, and free speech. And it's plenty of entertainment too. Sounds like fun.

I left my last job a few weeks back and it's high time to look for a new one. If you're working on something interesting and think I could help, let me know!

It's nice to not have a day job while looking for another. I was lucky enough to do this once before in 2012 which turned out great. I learned then that time and flexibility lets you talk to lots of friends and learn about a breadth of projects. I found a fun project in a new domain (online education), something I doubt I'd have found the normal way.

Maybe I'll get lucky again.

Enough small talk, what am I looking for?

I'm looking for some flavor of line manager. I'm a good senior manager and code-every-day engineer; but I'm exceptional leading a team and running a project. That's what line managers do: lead engineers, not other managers or departments or matrix-anything. Also, if you're some kind of executive then coding is an indulgence, and I'd rather it just be part of my job. Mostly I'm talking to small companies, say 10-100 people (fun-size).

I want to build on my experience. I know infrastructure and cloud, SaaS and enterprise, and online education. I'm probably not the best person for your storage, security, gaming, e-commerce, or cryptocurrency company. I want to stay working on Internet technology. I like the (micro)services model. For my own projects I choose Python, JavaScript (frontend and backend), and Java. I know web operations, especially the Amazon stack.

Location is important: I don't want to do a daily Menlo Park to San Francisco round-trip. I'd like to work with friends if possible. And I want to do something worthwhile.

You can always get to my resume from the header here, or via this short link. I'm open to a bunch of things, just no kick boxing. Let's have coffee/drink or take a walk.

Right when I was thinking about writing a post about much we overlook the sins of the status quo, some Swedes took care of it for me. Tack vänner!

Tear around town carrying gallons of incendiary liquid just inches beneath my beloved family? In a mode of transport that kills upwards of thirty thousand Americans every year? Sure, that's fine.

When I have to tell someone no, I pick up the phone. I hate talking on the phone, but I do it anyway.

When you're answering no to someone, you're disappointing them even if just a little bit. So you owe it to them to talk instead of sending an email. It's the polite thing to do.

But there are two other reasons, selfish reasons, for making the call. First, you get immediate feedback on how they took the news. If they're upset then you can do damage control straight away. And at least you know! And second, delivering bad news directly and respectfully is an important skill to develop. We can all use the practice. And it's never as bad as I think it will be.

Three days ago I was hobbling around on a sore knee with a torn meniscus. But after just three days of icing and Ibuprofen and resting on the couch already my knee is almost better than it was before. This arthroscopic surgery stuff is amazing.

My knee had been getting progressively worse for the past few months. But the clincher was six weeks ago, when I was chasing around a dog that was loose in our front yard. A twist, pop, and I was down. The doctor I saw the next day confirmed that it wasn't anything "serious" like a torn ligament, but something was definitely wrong. When we went up to a week of family camping a few weeks back, I couldn't go on any hikes and could barely play ping pong. It was a real bummer.

So I met with a sports medicine doctor at Palo Alto Medical Foundation and got an MRI. He saw a few things wrong in there. A few days later, I was getting the procedure done. Viola.

Afterwards I was surprised that it didn't hurt. They did prescribe some pain medication (Hydrocodone plus Acetaminophen) that I've been taking when I go to bed, but haven't needed during the day. I've been using a machine that pumps ice water through a pad around my knee all day to keep it cool, and that's worked really well. So much better than ice packs. Totally recommend the ice machine.

Thanks to the good surgical team at Palo Alto Medical Foundation especially Dr. Colin Eakin. Their surgery center on Willow Road made the whole experience smooth and reassuring.

But one pro tip for you out there considering this. Don't read the wikipedia article on General Anesthesia the night before surgery. It's crazy stuff. Especially the parts about how we're still not really sure how it works, or the part about how the level of anesthesia where it is safe to operate is right between "excitement" where you vomit and twitch, and "overdose" where you stop breathing. Don't read that part.

I'm back to work tomorrow, and I expect to be back on my bike by next week!

I often wake up with a song going through my head. I don't know why this happens. The stranger thing the songs. Yesterday was good, I woke up to Led Zepplin's Immigrant Song — what a great way to start the day. But earlier in the week it was inexplicably the Golden Girls Theme Song. Gah!

I've heard them called earworms: songs that get stuck in your head and don't get out. So I'll share with you now the antidote, taught to me by my good friend Jane Manning. Thanks, Jane!

Sing David Bowie's song John, I'm Only Dancing. Not one of Bowie's better known songs, nor even one of his best, but remarkably well suited to this. I believe it's because the melody is kind of odd and not all that pleasant, so it's not going to get stuck itself. You kind of remember the melody and lyrics, but not quite, so that keeps you busy. It always does the trick.