From Small Town USA to San Francisco

Hi everyone! I'm Jeff but most people call me Gibby. I've spent over a decade working in technology and software engineering. I was born and raised in Montana and spent most of my life in the great outdoors exploring and enjoying the wilderness.

In January 2015 after 29 years living in my hometown I decided that I needed a change, I longed to be a big fish in a big pond. I wanted to move to the heart of technology. I landed a job with a software company called Atlassian and was to be part of a massive program of work to re-architect our entire back office systems. I'd never lived outside my home town and rarely traveled, this would be the craziest adventure of my life.

My entire life fit into half of this trailer! I ended up throwing away most of what I owned, including 25 years worth of computer parts and cables which I'd hoarded. I decided to sell my Jeep and just use public transportation. Within a couple weeks I was packed and ready to leave. I shut the trailer, said goodbye to my family and boarded a plane to San Francisco to start my new life.

Since I've moved to the Bay Area I've done some very cool and interesting things in technology. I've met a lot of very smart people and become much more advanced in my career. It hasn't always been easy to deal with the amount of change living in a massive population center, but it has been worth it.

My job allows to travel to Sydney out our main office a few times a year so I occasionally sound like an Aussie after a couple beers.

It became clear that technology and software had given me a life that was impossible to achieve without it.

I've found that I really like to mentor people who are new to the area and technology. Especially those who haven't haven't had a lot of opportunities in life. One of the coolest things I've done is that I created web design learning content for survivors of human trafficking at Google's sf office.

I've been involved with a lot of groups helping people learn web design. I love to teach and get people excited about technology, especially kids.

These kids all come from low income families in rural Montana. The mill shut down in their town and most of the people in the town lost their jobs. Together we learned to build solar powered robots and raced them. My hope is that someday they realize that technology can take them as far as they want to go.