Matt Brubeck

Oh, yeah! I work at Kiha with bellwethr now. It's nice.

I had a month off between jobs. I spent some time interviewing at several companies, served on a jury (criminal trial; drug possession, crack cocaine; guilty), and spent a lot of time playing with Eleanor and doing work around the house.

Eleanor is talking more every day. She chooses to wear pink almost all the time (despite our best efforts to give her clothes in lots of different colors). She plays make-believe games with her toys. She still wants to spend about half of each day reading books. Her favorite place to go is the grocery store.

I'm sitting at home, unemployed, sick, taking care of a sick child, with no heat and no stove. And feeling pretty good.

My job at blist did not last very long. My peers were great, I contributed a lot, and it was a much-needed change at the time. But I was demotivated by the CEO/founder's management style, and he was never satisfied with my effort. So last week as the company blew past its planned launch date with no shippable product and no achievable end in sight, I was let go. Our two contract engineers also left in the same week. I wish the best to the remaining five engineers. I feel no regret—I knew it wasn't the right place for me, and was already planning on quitting soon.

If you know of a great job opening in Seattle (not including the Eastside, sorry), please see my resume and send me a note. I'm already talking to Google, and I'm on the fence about interviewing at Amazon again.

In other news, we're all moved in to our new house (photos here) and we're having a party this weekend. If you want to come and haven't gotten an invitation yet, just let me know!

I did finally come down with the cold that Sarah and Eleanor have had for over a week now. So my first few days of unemployment have been spent sleeping and reading Anathem. Our heater and other gas appliances are out while we wait for our new natural gas furnace to be approved by the city inspector. We haven't had a working dryer or dishwasher since we moved, or a working stove since our old electric one was hauled away weeks ago. Fortunately it's sunny and warm for once in Seattle, so we have the clothesline and grill set up in the back yard. Here's hoping everything's back to normal soon!

Starting in early June, I'm working at blist, an early-stage startup located in Seattle. Their product is a web application that makes databases easy to create and share; check out the web site for more information.

I had a great three years at Amazon, but I was getting eager to do something new, and to get back into the small-company world. This happened a little sooner than I'd planned, sice the founder of blist contacted me last month with a opportunity that seemed to good to pass up. Among other cool things, I will be the fourth Mudder at blist (out of about 12 employees); the others are Paul Paradise '03, Jeff Scherpelz '04, and Jonathan Beall '07 (as an intern).

I broke the news to my team yesterday. This was a bit difficult, because the developer who's been on the team for the second-longest time (after me) also announced yesterday that he's leaving Amazon in June. So I feel even worse for my teammates than I expected, but, well, these things happen and the team has survived plenty of similar changes before. The hard part is that I really like my teammates, and that was the main thing that kept me at Amazon this long. If you like your work for its meaning or the challenge or the pay, then it's your own loss if you quit. But if you like it because you have great co-workers that you get along with really well, then you feel responsible for their feelings too.

I mentioned to the junior member of our team—a college hire from this fall—that I think everyone should experience working in both a big company and a small company. In either environment, you can learn and do things that you can't in the other. Right now I've learned all I was ready to learn from Amazon, and now I want to apply it somewhere where I can hopefully make a bigger impact.