Google, here I come!
This may be a somewhat unexpected announcement for many of you, but I'm delighted to announce that as of April 7th I will be an employee at Google. (If you really needed to follow that link to know who Google are, I have no idea what you're doing reading my blog in the first place.)
This may seem an unusual move for someone who has been concentrating on C# for a while - but I view it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with some of the smartest engineers around on hugely exciting projects used by billions of people. Strangely enough, at the moment I don't really know how to build an application which supports billions of users. I'm looking forward to finding out.
This is likely to mean an end or at least a temporary hiatus in my professional use of C# - but that doesn't mean my interest in it will die out. I'm still looking forward to seeing what's in C# 4 :) I'm likely to be using Java for my day-to-day development, which is at least familiar ground, and as Josh Bloch works at Google I'll be in good company! (Do you think he'd trade a copy of the new edition of Effective Java for a copy of C# in Depth?)
I'll be working in the London office, but will spend the first two weeks in Mountain View. I don't yet know what I'll be working on, but many of the projects in London are in the mobile space, so that seems a reasonable possibility. Whatever project I end up on (and it's likely to change reasonably frequently) it's hard to imagine that life will be dull.
It seems fitting to thank my wife Holly at this point for supporting me in this - my daily commute will be significantly longer when I'm at Google, which means she'll be doing even more of the childcare, not to mention coping on her own while I'm in sunny California. She's been a complete rock and never once complained about the extra burden I'll be putting on her.
So, I'm currently a mixture of terrified and extremely excited - and I can't wait to fly out on Sunday...