Goodbye Ireland!

Early in the January 2011 me and my family moved to Dublin and I took position as a Senior Software Engineer with AOL. This was a big decision for my family for lots of reasons, and not an easy one to undertake as you can imagine. Anyway, everything that has a beginning, has an end, and this time the end was not so distant... In late 2011 we decided to return to Poland for personal and family reasons. So, after 13 months I'm back at home in Poland.

The decision of returning was almost equally difficult to that of leaving one year ago, and my last days in Ireland will be the most memorable ones - last night & last few pints with friends from AOL, lots of good words I heard from co-workers, last walk in the city centre etc. It's these moments you actually realise you're loosing something and leaving it behind...
Anyway, it's time to move on. Let me try to summarize the last 13 months:


Good things:

• working for AOL was good.
• made a lot of friends at AOL - brilliant people and smart engineers. I'm going to miss you guys!
• learned a lot of new technologies such as Erlang and got familiar with cool stuff such as ZeroMq, Thrift, Goole Protocol Buffers (protobuf), NodeJs and others.
• worked on the backend of one of the biggest Ad-solutions (ADTECH) & learned how advertisement business on the internet works. This was completly new stuff for me.
• Been to PyCon 2011 and listened some amazing talks and lectures from bright people such as Raymond Hettinger or Paul Barry.
• Been to one of Google Techology Group monthly talks at Google HQ in Dublin.
• Had two wonderful weeks of sunny holidays on Tenerfie / Canary Islands (you wouldn't think I was going to say 'in Ireland', would you? ;)) in the summer.
• lived in a quiet and green area of Dublin, in Ashtown (north city), close to Phoenix Park, around 6 kms from cirty centre. Nice area.
• Been to a few cost towns - Malahide, Howth, Dalkey to name a few. Very nice places with beautiful views.
• improved my English - I think my understanding of English has improved, although some Irish people still give me trouble if they're mumbling ;).

Bad things:

• I'm on the lookout for new job again.
• Feeling a bit lost and confused. May take a few weeks to adjust to new (old) reality again ;)

That's it, not so many bad things to talk about. Attached are a few photos taken during my last walk in the city centre. Cheers!