It’s official: we’re now moved out of the old offices at Bunker Hill Lane and have now taken up quarters right downtown at 95 S. Market Street #500, San Jose, CA 95113. (Note the way I slipped in the address update: subtle, huh?).
Anyway, the move went as well as can be expected when some two dozen computers, 50,000 comics, and countless boxes containing everything from network switches to voodoo dolls are involved. Big thanks go to everyone who helped out—as well as all our customers for bearing with us through the relocation.
As it stands now, we’re largely operational again, although (as usual) we’re having some drama with the phones. For now, the best way to reach us is by email or, if you have a technical question that isn’t too pressing, post to the forums. It’ll likely be a few days before everyone has their desks unpacked and start getting caught up on everything. That said, we’re still anticipating pushing out an update this week for ComicBase.
Initial impressions on the new place: I like it–a lot! Let me count a few of the ways…
1) Location. It’s about five miles from my house, which means I get an hour of my life back each day just in commuting time. Or, if I want, there’s actually a way to bike back and forth. Doing so involves going through a pretty crazy bike path that runs alongside highway 87, but at least it saves gas and gives me a chance to get some exercise.
2) Location. Downtown San Jose is getting cooler all the time, and we’re right in the heart of it. At our old place (on the outskirts of Santa Clara, in an office park), the best you could do for lunch without driving was a Togos up the road. From where I am now, I’m within walking distance of dozens of great restaurants, hot dog stands, take out places, and a nice park to have lunch in. There’s also a concert series in summertime in the park across the street, as well as the famous Christmas in the Park displays come wintertime. Oh! And we’re two blocks from both The Tech Museum and from Adobe’s headquarters.
3) Private Offices. I made a terrific mistake last time I chose offices when I went for “open plan” and didn’t ask the landlord to build in at least one private office. As programming guru Joel Spolsky warned so long ago: programmers need offices. It’s not for status—it’s simply that when you’re programming, it takes way too much time to mentally “load up” the program and get down to work—and all that can be shattered in an instant by the sort of interruptions that go on constantly in a cubicle environment. I’d actually gotten to the point at the last office that I was intentionally coming in late and saving my important work until everyone had gone home just so I could have uninterrupted time. Now, I have the option of just closing my door. I admit, I’ll probably miss out on a lot of good office banter this way, but I’ll also be a lot less stressed out about getting my work done.
4) Friendly Neighbors. Carolyn has a great blog entry on this one that made me laugh out loud. I’ve also probably had more friendly chats with neighbors in the building in the past four days than I did with all our neighbors in the old building in two years. I still don’t know what two of the companies on my old floor actually did… So far at this location, I’ve discovered a music magazine publisher, a nightlife magazine publisher, an internet firm, and met the folks at the law firm next door who (gasp!) are not only incredibly nice, but actually like comics. (They also were kind enough to receive a couple of our desks for us while we were out schlepping stuff from the old offices. Thanks, guys!).
5) Faster Internet. For years, we’ve been champing at the bit for a faster internet pipe, but there was simply no way to get one at the old location without laying out ruinous amounts of money (and we were being quoted low to mid four-digits per month for colocation as well). Thanks to the better connectivity downtown, we’ve already got more than twice the bandwidth as we used to for just a little more than we’d paid previously, and there’s the possibility to scale it higher as business demands. All this means that not only is our site faster, but we can do more with it as well (as the folks checking out the development builds of Atlas found out in the d3 release last week).