Nearly 2.5 years into my time in San Francisco, I’ve decided to head back to Canada.  This hasn’t been an easy decision for me as I’ve loved my time here.  But, I’m excited for the future and for new opportunities.

I posted a few times when I first arrived about my experiences in SF.  I would highly recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to work abroad to do it.  It’s an awesome way to learn, gain perspective and have experiences you might not have in your home country.

Leaving a great organization like Atlassian is also a difficult choice, but ultimately the right one for the long term.  I’m going to miss working and such an innovative company with awesome people.

San Francisco is an amazing place and I hope to come back and visit regularly.  In particular I’m going to miss the great food and cheap, quality beer here.  I don’t think there’s another city in the world that offers such excellent grub.

Surprisingly, I’m also going to miss baseball.  I never really followed before I came to SF and now I’m a huge Giants fan.  I guess I’ll be getting an MLB.tv account for next summer.

That all being said, I’m extremely pumped to give Vancouver as a try as my new home city.  To be close to friends, family and of course the Canucks is going to be an amazing experience!  I’m looking forward to finding my next professional team to join and to make an impact in a great organization.

Looking to brush up on your coding skills?  Learn a new programming language?  Just getting started at coding?  If any of these apply to you, I’d highly recommend trying out Codecademy.

Codecademy is a website that will guide you through the basics of coding.  There are a number of modules, including basics of software development to JQuery and JavaScript tutorials.  They’re a lot of fun and some of them can be surprisingly challenging.  There’s a great Q&A community that can help if you get stuck during any stage.  There’s also a badge system that gives you an added sense of pride when finishing challenges.

Codecademy also launched Code Year in January, a service that sends out coding exercises via email and encourages weekly participation in lessons.

I’ve recently getting my hands dirty with code again in my spare time and Codecademy is a great way to get in touch with a new language.  Best of all, it’s a free service and new content is being added regularly.  Check it out!

A while back I posted about how I upgraded the hard drive on my (now old) MacBook Pro.  Since then, I’ve upgraded to a newer 15" MacBook pro and have been really happy with it.  I’ve also started using a MacBook Air at work, and I did notice that the startup times and overall snappiness of my Air were much better than my Pro.

Given that my MacBook Pro has higher specs, I chalked the performance up to the Solid State Drive on my Air.  So I set out to find a good deal online and came across this drive: Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s (CT256M4SSD2).

When I purchased it on Amazon.com the price was $199, which is pretty good for a 256GB hard drive.  The prices of SSDs have come down considerably in the past year.  I did a bit of spring cleaning on my old hard drive to clear up space and found that 256GB is ample space for all my data and leaves room for growth.

Installation was a piece of cake, and I just restored the latest backup from my Time Capsule.  When installing my previous HDD I did have some issues using an older installation DVD for this, but I was able to use a Snow Leopard disc to restore a Lion backup.  2 hours later my system was restored to the new drive and everything was ready to go.

I’ve noticed a significant increase in boot times, application loading times and general performance.  Heck, I’ve even seen dungeons in Diablo III load faster.  Bonus!

Hopefully this configuration will keep me happy for a while and not want to pickup one of the new MacBooks that Apple is expected to release at WWDC 2012.  I’d highly recommend upgrading to an SSD, especially considering how much prices have dropped recently.