williamhathaway.com

I  admit to a bias since I work for a Splunk reseller, but I’m primarily an end-user of their product when I am consulting.   I think Splunk is doing a lot of things right as a software vendor. Namely:

• The software generally works as advertised
• It is very easy to get up and running, and the architecture is easy to change if your requirements shift
• Updates occur on a pretty quick cadence
• There is a free license version of the product that has a reasonable amount of functionality and works fine for people that don’t have a huge data need
• All of their documentation is freely available (I dislike vendors that make you spend $ or jump through hoops to access docs)
• They use the excellent StackOverflow engine for their community driven support site answers.splunk.com, making it easy to contribute and floating good answers to the top

Another company that I hold in a similar light is Atlassian (although they don’t have free versions, they have licenses for the first 10 users available for $10, which is close enough).

Here are my thoughts on living in the south SF Bay area now that my wife and I have been here for a while:

Pros

• It is awesome being in such a cultural melting pot
• The supply of interesting things to do is fantastic
• The density of technology oriented companies and people is amazing
• The weather is definitely better than central PA (although not as nice as an area like Santa Barbara)

Cons

• Housing costs are ridiculous (other costs are higher too, but housing is 3-5x central PA)
• Depending on time and direction, traffic can be horrible (mitigated for me by working from home)
• The state government seems really behind the times – my wife and I both had abysmal DMV experiences (the process and technology are busted, the people were friendly)

Notes

• A thumbs up to meetup.com for making it very easy to find groups of like-minded people to get together for activities
• The Mercury News’ events section is also handy when looking for things to do

Overall

I am really glad we made the move.  My wife now has a job that she absolutely loves, and besides missing our friends from the east coast, we are both really happy.