My last blog post before this one was in August and things have definitely changed in the lives of Barbara and I since then. The biggest change (really the only change but it has affected so much of my life it’s really a category rather then an item) is that I got a new job. I now work as a programmer for Justia Inc. Justia is a company that, among other things, provides websites for lawyers and law firms. The company is based in Palo Alto, California (in Silicon Valley).
As such this change of a new job also means that we no longer live with my parents in Texas but are now Californians. We have a small, one-bedroom apartment in Mountain View, California a few minutes’ drive from the Googleplex.
Those of you who know us best most likely know this by now, but I felt it was important to update my blog and let people know about these changes. Yesterday (December 18th) marked the 2 month (October 18th) anniversary of the day we moved into our new home here in California.
How do I like my new job? I have never been more content in working than I am now. Justia is a fantastic place to work and I am at once enjoying the work I get to do as well as enjoying my new life in California.
Justia has an interesting business model and seems to be focused primarily on offering fantastic services to the legal community, not only in the paid services but in the little services they are offering to the community for free. I have spent a good deal of my time since arriving here working on a project known as BlawgSearch and its sister site Blawgs.FM.
BlawgSearch (Blawg is yet another web contraction, as Blog stands for Web log, Blawg replaces the lo from blog with law indicating that a Blawg is a Law Blog, or I suppose, Web law log to be precise) is a website that indexes all of the posts of tons of legal blogs and allows users to do relevancy based full-text searches across them. Similarly, Blawgs.FM extends this service to Podcasts by allowing those searches to be restricted to posts that contain multimedia attachments. Both sites also feature a powerful directory of blawgs and blawgcasts (legal podcasts). The project has been great fun to work on and I’m proud of how my work is being used to offer a fantastic free tool to the internet community. For more information about BlawgSearch and Blawgs.FM, check out this post from Justia’s owner (my boss) Tim Stanley, or just visit the site and try out these powerful search tools for yourself.
Justia has been fantastic to Barbara and I from the very beginning. First, they hired me to work from Texas on a consultant basis so they could try out my programming abilities. After a little over a month of working for them on this trial basis they paid to fly both Barbara and I to California to meet them and while we were here offered me a full time position. A very short time later (a week and a half) Barbara and I were on the road driving to California to move into our new apartment with a van full of everything we own.
It’s an odd journey home for me, I was born in California and spent the first two-fifths of my life here. While I was in Southern California in my young life, I now find myself in the heart of Silicon Valley. After spending all my life as someone who lives for technology I find myself in the most technological area of the nation.
There’s something else really cool that just happened here at Justia today, but I’m going to wait until Justia has had time to announce it officially before I mention it in my own blog.