What’s Next 1

I moved to the Netherlands in August of 2017 when Lilia (then my girlfriend, now my fiancée) got a two year fellowship at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and kindly allowed me to tag along. I’ve tremendously enjoyed living in the Netherlands, but we made the decision to move back to the US in the fall at the end of that fellowship.

A lot went into that decision, but the long and short of it is that Lilia is very close to her family, and being an ocean away has been very difficult for her. We’re still not entirely sure exactly where we’re moving, but we’re hoping to have that nailed down by the end of this month pending some job stuff on Lilia’s end.

We will both greatly miss Euroland in general and the Netherlands specifically, but I’ll be back as often as I can for conferences, so y’all won’t ever totally rid yourselves of me. I’ll post something about where we’re moving in the States once we’ve made a final decision about where that’ll be.

In related news, I’ve really enjoyed working with the awesome folks at Bakken & Bæck, but when we decided to make the move, I started keeping an eye out for gigs that would let me work from anywhere in the US, and which might eventually be a way for me to move into developer relations.

I figured looking for something that would fit both of those bills would take a while, as that combination is relatively rare. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to find something that let me do both, let alone something that I was super interested in.

I’m happy to announce that I hit the jackpot, and got something that well cleared all three of those bars.

I’m joining Apollo GraphQL and taking over their open-source iOS SDK. Their engineering team is mostly remote, and there’s clear opportunities to take my speaking and writing skills to the next level in helping mobile developers learn more about the GraphQL platform generally and Apollo products specifically.

I’m honored, thrilled, and slightly terrified to be entrusted with bringing the leading SDK for GraphQL up to speed, and I’m excited to get started. I’ll be starting on the 24th of June after wrapping up my work at Bakken & Bæck.

I’m really excited about the prospects of GraphQL going forward. When I’ve played with it, the potential for it to tremendously shorten long iteration cycles with the potential for communication confusion between backend and client-side devs jumped out to me as an enormous benefit, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it in detail.