After eight years in Austin my wife and I recently moved to Boston.*  Austin was a great place to live, but we were ready for a change, and we’ve enjoyed visiting the Boston area so much that we wanted to move there.  And here we are!

Sadly, leaving Austin meant I had to leave my job at Silicon Labs.  I really liked that job and my coworkers; I highly recommend Silicon Labs to anyone in the Austin area.

Fortunately I found a great job at Ember in the Seaport District of Boston. I’m working on embedded software for our ZigBee chips.  My team has been really welcoming and I’m coming up to speed as quickly as I can.

So far working and living in the Boston area has been great!  We’ve played tourist a bit, and we finally found a good place to live after much searching.  Oh, and we were here for the great “Blizzard of 2010!” I had to dig our car out from under the snow, so perhaps I’ve even earned some winter-weather-survivor cred.

The biggest differences between Austin and Boston so far:

• The weather.  Today in Austin: sunny and a high in the 70’s.  Today in Boston: snowing and low 30’s. I’m adjusting to the cold much quicker than I thought, which is good.
• The commute.  Public transit isn’t very developed in Austin, so I drove everywhere.  In Boston I take the subway + bus in to work every day.  It’s really convenient and I can use the time to read, work, or whatever.
• The accent. Austin has some southern accents, Boston has some Boston accents. Austin has water fountains, Boston has bubblers.

I’m looking forward to settling in to our new home.  Hello, Boston!

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* And yes, Caustin will be the next city we move to.