February 8th marks the fifth anniversary of me moving to the Bay Area to work for tech startups. In retrospect it’s been a great experience despite it being the Bay Area.

Culture

Living in the Inland Empire, I was an hour away from LA and all that culture, but I never bothered doing it. Living 5 miles outside of San Francisco has mean the City is a constant part of my life: restaurants, concerts, museums, lots of things I could have theoretically done more of in SoCal but never bothered to.

Professional Development

While the Bay Area is a terrible echo chamber full of tech magpies who cling onto the newest shiny thing, it’s also been good to be on that cutting edge and see it for what it is: it’s not a holy priesthood of people Up There going to meetups you have to hope get recorded and put online a month later, it’s just a bunch of people.

I’ve been able to get back into web development after years of being out of it and the landscape has changed a lot but all the fundamentals are the same. The Referer HTTP header still exists.

Quality of Life

Quality of life is a mixed bag. It’s crowded and expensive, but there’s stuff to do. We basically throw an entire paycheck into our apartment and single car, but I can take public transit everywhere and we’re an hour away from Napa. Now that we’re parents we appreciate the suburban wasteland that is the Inland Empire as a good place for kids.