This Sunday it was 14 years ago I stepped onto an airplane in Stockholm, Sweden. In the morning hourse of January 1, 1998, my dad and my sister took me to the airport for my move to the US. I had married Angie back in August, and soon after that she told me she wanted to move back to the US. I applied for and got a resident visa (green card) and got a job with IDG in Boston. Initially we had planned to move to Seattle, but when I was offered the job in Boston I took that one instead.
Some 18 hours later I landed in Spokane, WA, where Angie met me. She had been staying with her mom, who lived in northern Idaho, while I got our appartment in Sweden packed up in 13 moving boxes (that is what I could afford to ship) and I got everything finished at my previous job at IDG in Sweden. My last task was to build an editorial system in Lotus Notes 4.6, that I built in 3 weeks. By the way, this system is still in use today, having survived several attempts to have it replaced with different other publishing systems.
After four days of driving cross-country from Idaho to Boston, we got an apartment and I started working as a full-time Lotus Notes developer on January 7.
Much have happened since. In 2000 we had our son Erik, in May 2002 we moved to Texas and I started working at Deep South as a Sr. Lotus Notes developer, in late summer of 2002 we moved into our first house, and then in July 2003 Angie and I separated and finally divorced aftyer 6 years of marriage.
It is interesting that I now have been working with Lotus Notes almost three times the time I was married, despite all the claims I have seen for many years that "Notes is Dead"…
As always, it will be exciting to see what the coming year brings me, both on a personal and professional level. Perhaps I will finally get the time to learn Xpages and/or Java?