2019 was a roller coaster in terms of my employment status. The year kicked off with a good start with a one-year contract with Company N from January. The position was to lead their developer conference in Tokyo in September as the program manager. So, the first order was to learn their flagship event in San Jose in March. However, due to a company-wide budget cut in February, the contract prematurely ended in three months.
While I was working for Company N in Santa Clara, I was able to moonlight at Agency D, which is conveniently located five minutes away from Company N. At Agency D, I produced two online workshop series to teach presentation techniques. I was fortunate to work with amazing presenters and a fabulous creative director while hiring a seasoned freelance crew. That was going from January through May.
June was my last month as a freelancer, finishing up Client A’s developer conference through Agency D. It was a bittersweet farewell to my eighth-year project with Client A. I identified my successor in the midst of the project and trained him on the job, hoping this transition can be smooth for the next year.
Upon finishing up the last freelance gig, my full-time job started in June. I had one weekend to rest after working crazy hours at the last event. Commuting to Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and San Francisco was hectic. I sometimes forgot which office I was heading and missed my freeway exits. After managing projects for 10 years, managing employees is an interesting shift for me. I had to refresh my memory to do this role from my production company days.
The fall season was all about Dev Summit, which is an abbreviation for developer summit events for different product areas, such as Android and Chrome. I remember we had a couple of dozen studio shoots during the peak week while coordinating on-location shoots for multiple countries.
In November, we had fun with Studio Summit. It was the first effort for all studio personnel to get together in Mountain View in order to exchange ideas and test out studio workflow among a dozen people from London and New York. We benefited from face-to-face communication and got to know each other outside of work.
That’s all for the Year 2019. It may sound like a cliché, but the year proved to me that “one door closes, another door opens.”