Goodbye, New York. Hello, Boston!

This past weekend, after a ~3 year tenure in Manhattan, NYC, I moved to Boston.

It was a crazy weekend that included endless shopping, moving boxes and furniture, painting walls, getting 2 parking tickets, and even attending my friend's wedding. (Guess where? In New York, of course! :) ).

I'm exhausted, but I made it.

Now I need to figure out my life out here.

Paul Graham thinks that nerds don't like New York. At least in my case, he's way off the mark. I love New York. I think it's one of the best cities on earth. No city is as exciting and fascinating as New York.

I will miss New York a lot.

Maybe Paul Graham is right: maybe I'm not a real nerd. Maybe all this Erlang stuff is just a facade, and deep down in my soul I really want to be a hip hop dancer or something :)

Nah... I really like coding. I enjoy this stuff. I sometimes work crazy hours just because I like it. When I don't work crazy hours, I often write code when I get home from work. Not always, though. I have a life outside of my MacBook.

So why Boston, of all places?

I didn't move here because I love Boston. I know Boston pretty well, and although I find it nice enough, I've never fallen in love with it. I definitely don't like it as much as I like New York.

The main reason I moved here is because my girlfriend of two years has been living here for a year now, and I wanted to live closer to her.

The second reason I moved to Boston is that wanted to be able to live cheaply for a while so I can live off my savings while I work on a fun project I want to build. I'm 26 years old, and I feel that this is a good time to do it. I don't have a lot of money, but I also don't have a wife, kids, college bills or mortgage payments. I don't even have a car (I'm from New York, remember? :) ). My savings will carry me for a few months. After that, maybe I'll have to find a real job or a consulting gig or something.

If that happens, I'll cross my fingers and hope that I can get a gig writing Erlang code.

I really enjoy working with Erlang much more than other languages for some reason. I don't even know if it's worth it anymore trying to come up with an objective-sounding list of justifications rather than just saying that I like how it feels.

Even if my project doesn't take wings, my investment in it will certainly bear fruit as I am planning on releasing all the framework-level code I write as open source. ErlyDB will see many improvements, but I will also probably release contributions to higher levels of the Erlang web development stack.

I hope that in a number of months, few people will question that Erlang is a great language for building cutting-edge web applications.

We'll see how all this plays out. I'll keep you posted on my progress.