~pperalta

It has been a month since we (me, my wife, and my son) moved from central Florida to metro Boston. It is certainly a big change (especially moving in the middle of winter) but so far things are going quite well. Having grown up in a dense urban area I missed being able to walk everywhere instead of having to depend on a car. We can certainly do that here; I can walk to work, the grocery store, and quite a few restaurants and shops. Maria’s dad was in the military so she’s lived in many different places; however she’s never lived in a city. So far she’s adjusting quite well. She was quite comfortable in Florida but she was willing to go through all these changes just so that I could have a cool job. Things should be a lot more fun when it isn’t below freezing outside; we’ll be able to explore more of Davis Square and Boston in general.

So here are my favorite and least favorite things about Boston. First the bad: everything seems to be decentralized. In New York 95% of anything that’s important happens in midtown or downtown Manhattan which is very easily accessible by public transit, including buses, subways and cabs. In New England it seems that there is a lot going on that isn’t in Boston proper. For instance, the next No Fluff Just Stuff advertises itself as coming to Boston, but the show is really in Danvers which is about 20 miles north of Boston. You certainly can’t take the T there unless you count the commuter rail which is nowhere near as convenient. Ditto for the New England JUG which is at the Sun campus in Burlington. I’ve noticed that most high tech companies are in the highway 128 corridor, which means you have to drive to get there.

Now the good: the law here is great when it comes to pedestrians in crosswalks. When you drive up to a marked crosswalk that has pedestrians you must stop and let them cross. The first time I visited Tangosol they took me out to lunch and we had to cross a few streets to get there. Even though there was oncoming traffic (albeit slow traffic) they stepped right out into the crosswalk as if nobody was there. If you try that sort of thing in New York you’ll get yourself into a fist fight (which I actually did witness a few weeks ago at the corner of Steinway and 31st in Astoria.)

Working at Tangosol has been a terrific experience. The software engineers here are top notch and they are solving some difficult and interesting problems in the realm of distributed and multi threaded programming. In the month that I’ve been here my work has been varied; I’ve worked on code samples for customers, testing, reproducing issues, answering support emails, and a little bit on Coherence itself. I’m looking forward to learning more about the product and the realm of high performance distributed computing in general.