The plan.. a whole lot of “And thens”

TLDR:

Done: Chicago -> Jax -> Panama City Beach Florida -> Kathleen GA -> Atlanta GA -> Whitesburge/Newnan GA

Upcoming: Chelsea AL -> (Memphis or New Orleans still deciding) -> Austin TX -> Roswell NM -> Albuquerque NM -> Grand Canyon -> Vegas -> (San Diego or LA not sure yet) -> San Fran -> Portland -> Inner Oregon -> Seattle -> Alaska -> Burning Man -> Around the world (not yet planned at all)

My journey started back on March 16th 2011 when as all of you know Obie and I decided to call it quits. I decided the next day that it was time for me to live one of the dreams I have always had.. To travel around the world visiting as many places as I can and to experience the land, cultures, and people… So.. I put in my notice at Hashrocket with no money saved up and no real plan. I decided I am just gonna wing it.. Janis said it best in Bobby McGee… “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”. I pretty much discarded everything.. And yeeess I know she isn’t the original author…

I left Chicago on April 12th, *I think*, after having a very awesome last week at Hashrocket Chicago including a wonderful going away party full of great people. I will post pictures from the party and whirlyball soon.. I swear… I am horrible about staying on top of that stuff, who am I kidding.. it will probably be forever before I get them up but I swear I will try hard to not take forever.

I went to Jacksonville by plane and spent my last few days at Hashrocket there in Jacksonville Beach. It was a pretty crazy and fun week but I don’t think we really got a lot of pictures. Everyone was awesome and supportive. I love everyone at Hashrocket very dearly and I appreciate all the love and support I am getting from them.

Next up was Panama City Beach Florida, which was not on the original plan but now that folks are finding out they are giving me detours and this happened to be the first.

I then headed to Kathleen Ga for a few days to see my parents, Dresden, Donya and Jason before taking off for over a year. I picked up my Miata and headed to the Atlanta and spent a few days and saw many of my very amazing friends and their families.. Thanks to Dave and Cat for letting me crash in their spare room. Also got to have an awesome dinner with the kids and we started planning out my trip. Taylor and Liam are amazing kids and I am very lucky to be a part of their lives. I love those two with all my heart.

I am currently on my second detour. I am spending a week with a friend out in the woods of Georgia. My friend is busy during the day so I have been hanging out with Kimberly and getting my car all sorted out for the trip until the evenings. Unfortunately, I got news today that Leeloo (my miata) is not well and needs some serious work. :/ Might throw a wrench into the trip a bit but we’ll see. Gonna get a second opinion and also look into other options.

I am planning to make one more trip down to see my family in Kathleen and again up to Atlanta for one more weekend with friends. From there I am heading over to Alabama to see Ramon, Melanie, Cody and Avery (family). Don’t know how long I will stay but probably at least a few days. That should put me out to about mid to end of May.

I am still trying to decide the route I want to take to Austin so when I figure that out I’ll let all of you know but Austin to see Nola is definitely on the list. From there I am making my way over to Roswell NM cause I am sort of a UFO geek. (I hide it well but I have always had a fascination) and I also want to go to Bottomless Lake.. which I expect will be a lot like that thermal pool we swam in down in Atacama Chile this past year.

Albuquerque is next and is ONLY on the list so that I can say out loud “Hey Bugs! I’m taking a LEFT!” I’ll record it for ya’ll.

Then over to the Grand Canyon – so much I have to look up about this part of the trip. Any advice is welcome!

From the grand canyon probably gonna meet up with Kimberly over in Vegas if she can make it out. Then down to either San Diego or LA not sure on San Diego.. but I have never seen Hollywood so I gotta do that.

After that I am just gonna head up the coast stopping along the way to see friends. San Francisco is of course on that list and then on up to Portland Oregon to see more friends and then into inner Oregon to hang in the woods/tree houses with Lisa for July.

Then up to Seattle to see more friends and on to Alaska where I am hoping to stay for a bit. I really need to talk to Bess and find out if its okay to stay with them.. even if its not I am still planning on going up there. I want to see the aurora borealis and experience 24 hours (or close to them) days.

After Alaska back down for Burning Man!

That will take me through to the first week of September… From there I figure new Zealand, Australia, the pacific islands, Indonesia, China, Japan, Thailand… Again I have to figure out my routes and countries but that is the general idea.

I have no set time frame, I will have a plan but I expect the plans to change and don’t know when I will be where yet and won’t until I get closer.. So that’s it..

I am trying to track things daily in Mercury App so if you want to follow feel free. These are probably much more prone to typos, spelling errors, grammar mistakes and in general I do not promise them to be interesting or even readable. Well I just mean it will have more errors than I normally have. This entry I am sure is littered with errors but I don’t really have time to be to picky about it. Its mostly for me anyway and I don’t care if I make mistakes as long as I know what I meant later when I want to know. Anyway.. I plan to type the MercuryApp entries fast and just try to get my thoughts down as best I can.. You are welcome to read along if you like. Also some of these might get personal.. not sure how it is going to turn out but here it is..

Additionally, I will be posting pictures I will try to put notice here of those pictures/videos etc.

Lastly I will be tracking my progress in some way or another. Right now I am not sure if that will be with a google map I manually manage (2 one for where I am planning to go and then one for actual) or if I will be using something like Google Latitude or what.

We’ll just have to see. Either way I will post links here.

“The only constant is change”

TLDR: We broke up, we are cool, I am leaving hashrocket and going traveling on April 15th.

To whomever may be interested:

Obie and I live in a very small world with many mutual friends and colleagues, because of this we feel the need to convey the following information publicly and openly. Obie and I have decided to call off the engagement and break off our relationship. This was a very difficult decision for us because we both still love each other dearly. We are each others best friends but we are no longer IN love with each other. We have tried to correct this many times and for a length of time longer than I think either of us would like to admit. Our strong friendship bond has made this change a difficult one for us in the past. However, being IN love is a must in all successful relationships and without that we simply can not continue being together as a couple.

We plan to stay friends in the future and neither of us harbor any ill will toward the other one. It isn’t anyone’s fault…. these things just happen.

In addition, to this particular life change but unrelated, I have also decided to leave Hashrocket. Hashrocket is an amazing company and I have nothing but incredible things to say about it however, I would like to do something different. My long term plan is to become a CTO/Co-Founder for some fantastically wonderful company in the San Francisco Bay area. My short term goal is to take some time off. This seems like a perfect time to do some traveling that I have always wanted to do. I have a lot of skymiles saved up and what better time than now to use them. Friends prepare your couches for a Desi arrival. I may go off the grid for a little while (read that as off facebook, twitter, email etc) on or around April 15th, which is my last day at Hashrocket, so that I can rest/reset and come back to these goals refreshed and re-energized.

Obie will be moving to NYC in the near future to continue building his new startup into a smashing success. (RightBonus).

We would appreciate it if people could keep their advice, opinions, condolences etc to themselves. Even though this is the right decision for us it still isn’t an easy one. Tweets, facebook messages, emails etc from people will just make the transition harder for us. We know that you all love us and if we need anything at all we’ll make sure to reach out.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and best wishes to you all.
Desi and Obie

Hashrocket Chile

As many of you know I moved down to Santiago Chile back in October to start up the Hashrocket Chile office. Since then I have been working primarily with
Leo Soto.

In January, Thais Camilo

came over from Brazil and paired with us for a week, the outcome being that she starts with us here in Chile in the next couple of weeks.

Durran Jordan

of Mongoid/MongoDB fame will be joining us here in the beginning of April. (He is saying goodbye to JAX!)

So WOW, things are going great. A team of 4, I am soooooooo stoked!

But here is the thing.. Hashrocket is doing really well and we are thinking about taking on yet another pair here in Chile! If we find the right people of course…

The details go a little like this:
What we expect of you:

• Passion
• Aptitude
• Desire and ability to learn and adapt
• Experience in web development, preferrably with Ruby/RoR, but if you have experience, Ruby can be learned.
• English communication skills. I don’t care if you say “she” when you mean “he” or other small understandable mistakes but we need you to be able to communicate. We pair all day, everyday and the primary language we do that in is English. Us native speaking English folks are learning Spanish too but our clients speak English and our US team speaks English so you need to be able to do so as well.
• You must live in or move to Santiago Chile.

Things that help:

• Experience with Agile practices
• Spanish

What you (hopefully) expect of us:

Top quality, challenging work in a comfortable, healthy environment amoung peers. The ability to grow, learn, and shine. ** See My Top 5 Reasons I love Hashrocket **
We want our people to be happy and enjoy coming to work everyday.

If this sounds like something you are a good fit for please send your resume in English to desi at hashrocket dot com.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact me at that email or on twitter: @desi.

Just in case you were wondering:

My top 5 reasons I love Hashrocket.

5. In the morning when I wake up I WANT to go to work
4. Our clients are awesome
3. We work with really cool (and usually cutting edge) technologies – Ruby, Rails, Mongo etc
2. The company actively encourages us to be part of and give back to the development community
1. My coworkers are all awesomely smart, beyond kind, and fun people to be around. I seriously <3 them

Well that sucked but oh well

I have neglected my blog for sooooo long and have recently decided I want to start blogging again. Firsts thing first.. upgrade the ridiculously out of date blog software. Ummm yeah that didn’t go so well. I tried for a few hours to update my severely out of date blog and finally decided that there really wasn’t anything that important on my blog that I hadn’t also posted to the DevChix blog and well.. I just trashed the whole thing and started over. So if you are coming here looking for something and you can’t find it now you know why. You should probably search over on DevChix. If it was here before it will be there also.

Anyway so happy blogging to me.