Strongly Typed

I met Monsur in April of 2005. I'd flown to New York on a Thursday night for an interview with Xanga. He and Jon met me at the hotel and took me to Times Square Brewery for a late dinner. After forty-eight hours of coding, eating, drinking, and socializing with the team I received a job offer and that was the beginning of my association with Monsur (as well as the rest of the great folks at Xanga).

Over the course of the next year I got to work closely with Monsur on various projects, be there when he got married, see Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, go on recruiting trips, attend PDC, and move over a hundred racked servers in the back of a U-Haul (see the pics). I've no doubt that life would have continued in much the same vein except that I met an amazing girl in California and decided to move across the country and marry her, which led to the close of the Xanga chapter in my life.

I've been blessed thus far in my life that I've never left a job because I didn't like the job - IBM was a great place to work, I have very fond memories (and a groomsman) from my time at Xanga, and Latham & Watkins was very good to me. In addition I can honestly say that I'd welcome to opportunity to work again with many of my past co-workers, which is why I'm really excited that Monsur accepted a job at Google. As one of the first programmers (perhaps the first) at Xanga I never expected Monsur to leave, so when I heard he was interviewing with Google I was shocked. However, I can attest to the fact that sometimes you have to leave something good behind because a new opportunity has arisen, and I'm glad that this new opportunity for Monsur is here at Google.

Congrats Monsur and welcome to Google! It's unlikely that we'll get called upon to move racks of servers here :)