+++
title = "Life changes and announcing SFBayAreaTech"
date = 2018-08-10T07:29:10-07:00
description = "Me and family moved, I changed jobs and announcing SFBayAreaTech a slack community for anyone working in tech who are based in the San Francisco Bay Area California"
draft = false
keywords = ["sfbayareatech", "slack", "community", "san francisco", "bay area", "california"]
tags = ["sfbayareatechies"]
categories = ["general"]
+++

#### Update: Since writing this blog, I have changed jobs and SFBayAreaTech has changed to <https://www.sfbayareatechies.com> ####

2018 has been a fabulous year so far. Me and [family moved to the San Francisco bay area](https://www.rahmanian.xyz/post/goodbye-virginia-and-hello-san-fransisco-bay-area/) realizing my life long dream and our family goals. 

It is absolutely an awesome experience living in the Bay Area amongst so many super smart techies and great startups. On arrival I had two initial goals, namely, meet everyone in tech and make friends and find a new awesome job with a startup that has a great future and potential solving problems that line up well with my interests and technical interests.

On the job front I am excited to have joined [Mya Systems](https://hiremya.com/) based in the heart of San Francisco. I started at Mya in May 2018 so I feel I have been there long enough now to know now if it is a good fit for my goals and I am happy to report that I am enjoying my work a lot at Mya and the icing on the cake is the culture and people are awesome to work with. I genuinely like everyone I work with at work (this is a bold statement from a cynical Englishman in San Francisco who believes in the law of sods).

At Mya we are building an A.I. recruiting assistant. I am pretty excited about this as the problem we are solving I can resonate with really well. Everytime I have looked for a job there has been many points of frustration for me where I felt the recruiter hasn't either kept me in the loop or got back to me in a timely fashion. It's not their fault, they are busy dealing with multiple candidates, doing interviews, arranging interviews and many other things, so an A.I assistant helping them and keeping me the candidate in the loop is win win situation where it reduces the load on the recruiter and avoids any frustration by me the candidate. Hence I predict a very bright future and success for Mya and I'm so glad to have been given the opportunity to join such an awesome company.

On to my goal of meeting everyone in tech and making some friends I have been going to a lot of tech meetups and conferences since arriving in San Francisco and I'm loving the learnings and networking. I even am co-organizer for two meetups already in the bay area [SF Scala](https://www.meetup.com/SF-Scala/) and [Elasticsearch San Francisco](https://www.meetup.com/Elasticsearch-San-Francisco/). I have met some great people including key contributors to many open source projects and tech celebrities that I have followed for years that I finally got the chance to meet in person (see if you recognize any of them in the pictures below):

![Tech celebrities](http://via.softinio.com/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-08-56-19.png)

One thing I noticed though, was that it was difficult to stay in touch with everyone. I mean we are all busy aren't we after all. I thought how can I improve this. I realized I keep in touch with people at work really well by using Slack. So I thought, wouldn't be nice to have a slack for everyone else in Tech who have any kind of affiliation to San Franscisco Bay Area? Thinking more about this I thought this would make things easier as we already have slack on our laptops and phones for work so adding another slack workspace is easy. 

So I created a slack workspace for everyone in tech who lives or works in the San Francisco Bay area. 

You can join it here:

### [Join SFBayAreaTech](https://www.sfbayareatech.xyz/)

I urge you all to join and lets have some fun sharing knowledge, jokes, events and simply enjoying conversation with our peers everywhere and not just with people at work. 

In the interest of transparency can I just confirm that I am doing this so we can all keep in touch better. I have no commercial motive for this.

I do need everyones help though please join and spread the word to everyone you know. I look forward to speaking with you all on Slack soon.

