Well, that was a crazy summer The last time I wrote I had just graduated and was looking forward to starting on the Product Quality Team at Google. Well, the big news is that I'm actually leaving Google a week from now. Unfortunately, the job turned out to involve much more manual work, and much less tool building, than I'd imagined. I wasn't learning things or doing work that I felt would advance my career. Fortunately, I have an amazing opportunity to work as a software engineer at Twilio, a startup that makes it easy for you to create applications that can make and receive phone calls, or send and receive text messages. For example, GroupMe, a group texting startup that was just acquired for $85 million, uses Twilio to send all of their text messages. It's also a great fit: everyone there loves learning (Twilio gives every employee a Kindle and $30 a month to spend on books) and even the people in less technical roles build awesome stuff for fun. So in one move I get to knock two hours off my commute, do work I enjoy much more and learn from a great team. So I'm starting at Twilio in two weeks. I did lots of other cool stuff over the summer, too. I interned at LUXr, a company that helps other startups design and deliver products with a great user experience, and worked on their website, which is launching this week. I also built half of a webapp that makes it easy for you to do mail merge from inside Gmail, then realized I should figure out if people would actually pay for it first (if you do, sign up!). I made the front page of Hacker News for the first time for Markdown.css, and then again three weeks later, with a post on how to design your personal website. I critiqued CMC's new website design, went salmon fishing in Alaska with the old man and went to the Outside Lands festival in SF. So that's that; I'm a little amazed I could go from not even knowing CSS in January 2010 to getting hired as an engineer at one of the best startups in the Bay Area in September 2011. I've still got a lot to learn, so I imagine I'll be working pretty hard in that role. I'm still trying to move into San Francisco, but I'm in the city around three days a week; if you're in town, I'd love to meet for dinner or drinks. If you're not, feel free to send me a quick update on what you've been up to. Good things are on the horizon, and I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Kevin