New Country and New Job

I thought when I moved my website to WordPress, I’d blog more. If anything, I’ve blogged less. But hey, I have a good reason. About 4 months ago, I moved to Dublin, Ireland. This was to start my job at The Search Engine company. Today I finish 4 months in Dublin. It feels like much more. It’s been an interesting and stressful few months. All the research we did for the months before we moved helped out. It came in especially handy while house hunting.

Ever since I got here, I feel like I’ve been trying to get things done to get my life stable. The first task was finishing up all my paperwork and initial setup tasks. So, registering with immigration, getting my PPS number, and getting setup with a phone. Once I had the essentials, the next step was finding an apartment. The Dublin rental scene is particularly stressful but thankfully, I had relocation assistance. We’re often better at research and we actually found the apartment ourselves. We used the relocation folks to negotiate the lease and help with the initial tasks of moving in.

We now live in a quiet North Dublin suburb. It’s so quiet that the loudest noise is often the sound of our ears ringing from the sheer silence. The beach is a short walk away, but we can’t see it from the apartment. My morning commute is a comfortable 45 mins by bus and train or about 25 mins by bicycle. On a good weather day, I cycle in to work. Living here, I realise how people run in the afternoon. The weather in the afternoon is actually often pleasant and not the kind that tries to kill you.

The job itself is interesting. I’m in a role that I have enjoyed a lot in the past. It’s a mix of doing ops work as a sysadmin and a bit of doing automation. The idea is to automate as much away as possible from our day to day ops work. My team has 10 of us in two different time zones who manage to do way more work than it should be possible for us. The biggest different from my previous jobs is that I work with Windows more often. It’s fun to learn new things. Everything is different and sometimes, things don’t work because Windows.