Two years at Google
A bit more than two years ago I was anxiously heading towards the reception of the Google Zurich office. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very excited. One year ago, I was oncall, dying of heat in my home. Today, I am on my last oncall shift as an SRE, rejoicing that it’s not too hot and that I finally have some quiet time to clean out my bookmarks and my inbox.
The last one year was very different from the previous one. The list of new experiences continued, but not all of them were positive. There was the weird realization that I might actually enjoy driving. There was the talk I gave at my university. There was the first relationship. There was the first time I set some quite ambitious goals and I managed to follow up on them. There was the first break up. There was the first orchestral concert I went to. There was the first depressive episode I had, along with a panic attack at work. There were limits discovered and pushed further than ever. There was me doing squats with 90 kg weights and running a 10k. There was me changing teams, so I could do machine learning and now I enjoy a lot more my work. There was me inviting some Swiss friends over for lunch and talking to them mostly in German for two hours. There was me reading a lot more Christian books and learning a lot more about God than before.
Looking back, I would say that it was a year in which I grew up a lot. I went through what was the first really difficult time in my life and by God’s grace, I came out on the other side, still alive. I put under a question mark a lot of my faith and my belief. The conclusion was that most things are still true, that I still trust in God, I still want to walk in all His ways, I still love Him, I still want to follow Him with all my heart and with all my soul, to keep His commandments and statutes, for they are for my own good. There were things I no longer see the point of, things which I did just because that’s what I saw around me as I was growing up, but they are not as numerous.
I step into the coming year with the same intention as last year, but a bit more wary of the fact that it will be hard and it will require constant abiding by the Lord to stay close to Him.