A Season of Change

When I studied at USF, the question 'What company do you want to work for when you graduate?' was always answered with 'For an open-source company.' Two years after graduation, I have finally managed to achieve my goal. I have moved from the comfortable weather of the Tampa Bay area to Woburn, Massachusetts to work for Acquia, a startup that focuses entirely on Drupal, just as Red Hat focuses on its flavor of Linux. I have been hired as a systems engineer, and I am really excited to apply my experience in HPC towards their Amazon EC2-based hosting platform. As I've discussed with colleagues in the past, HPC and cloud computing methodologies are starting to merge together, so I should be able to fall into place there just fine. I've already started to adapt tools for managing their servers as well as write various Nagios plugins for monitoring their infrastructure.

The weather here in Woburn is starkly different; We had blizzard conditions often and had to work from home sometimes. It's odd shoveling snow and scraping frost off of car windows as part of the morning commute. The benefits living here outweigh the disadvantages though: there is a Italian bakery, a Thai-Viatnamese restaurant, a steakhouse, TWO chinese restaurants, a Japanese restaurant, and a Brazilian restaurant all within walking distance from my apartment. If I wanted to drive, there's a really nice sushi place in Stoneham and a H-Mart in Burlington. It might be cold, but my tastebuds won't be bored anytime soon.

EDIT: Due to a combination of circumstances, I recently moved from Woburn to Burlington, which is the next town over. It's a mile away from H-Mart. I couldn't get enough of the place, I guess.