Rotacoo

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(Disclaimer: this post should probably be on my personal blog, but I got rid of that after I never posted there. If you’re only reading this site for the Google Sightseeing meta-news then I suggest you stop reading now.)

My wife and I have both lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for our entire lives so it is with some trepidation that this Friday we will be permanently relocating 400 mile south to Oxford, England.

Apart from the stress of moving away from all our family and friends, I was a little worried about employment in Oxford. We are moving for my wife’s new job, so I have given up my position at LEWIS (who are hiring by the way, great people to work with) and, for the time being, I will be unemployed.

Edinburgh seems to be overflowing with design agencies, which means there’s a lot of Web Development work around. To be fair I’ve not exactly been looking until now, but I’d never heard much about Oxford’s design agencies. The last thing I want to do is write software for a bank, so I was worried about job prospects.

I voiced these concerns to a few England-based visitors to last month’s Refresh Edinburgh and they all told me there was loads going on down south and mentioned a few names of folk in the area. I subscribed to a few key blogs and soon discovered Oxford Geek Night, a regular get-together of web geeks in a pub somewhere in Oxford. It’s very comforting to know that there’s enough people in the business down there for them to get together and fill a pub with geekery.

I’ve missed the most recent Geek Night but will be attending the next one, and in the meantime I’ve subscribed to a bunch of job-based RSS feeds and begun updating my CV. Since the last time I was seeking work the percentage of boring .net development jobs seems to be even higher, but it looks like there’s one or two positions doing agency web development.

Of course, with some free time I may even manage to implement a few things from the massive Google Sightseeing to-do list.