Take care of the people you love, and try to make yourself known and understood. Dial it down, work with your hands, keep it quiet, and share what you know.

— Frank Chimero, This One’s for Me

In 16 days our family will walk out of an empty house in Cape Town and get on a plane to Portland, OR. It will be a one-way journey. I’ve been searching for the words to write about it, but I haven’t quite found the right ones. So I guess these ones will have to do.

I started my first blog in 2004. It was hosted on Windows Live Spaces, and it was terrible. I called it Leave The Great Indoors (yes, because of the John Mayer song and we just moved countries and just roll with it ok?). I have no idea what I wrote about back then, but I must have felt that there was something to this writing thing, because a year later I moved it to Blogger (because more features!). It still exists, but please don’t tell anyone.

The writing thing kept growing on me, and a couple of months later I started a UX-focused blog called UX-SA (because User Experience, and I’m from South Africa, and yes it’s a stupid name for a blog). That one also still exists, but again, please don’t tell anyone.

It was only in late 2009 that I got serious about it, bought a domain name (I don’t know what I was thinking — no one can pronounce Elezea), installed WordPress, and got stuck in. I proceeded to go through several identity crises, which included a move from Silicon Valley to Cape Town, 2 kids, and realizing that I’ll never learn how to deal with angry comments so I should probably turn those off.

One day I wrote a post that got mildly popular, and Jim Dalrymple linked to it from The Loop. He also must have subscribed to my RSS feed, because he has linked to the site a few times since then — something I’m still surprised by and incredibly grateful for every time it happens.

Some time after that a guy I’d never met, who lives in Portland, started following me on Twitter. He’s a regular reader of The Loop, and he decided to check out this guy who has the same last name as he does (let’s call him Rudolph, because that’s his name). We started chatting a bit, and when he came to visit his extended family in Cape Town we caught up for coffee. We kept in touch, as like-minded people are prone to do.

Last August my wife and I went to San Diego for a family reunion. I also set up some interviews because we were strongly considering moving there. But we took one look at California and realized we won’t be able to live there again (Cape Town kind of gets you addicted to leafy mountain beauty, and well, California). On a whim I gave Rudolph a call, and asked him if he thinks we should move to Portland. I’d been following him on Instagram for a while, and it looked like a nice place.

So this random guy I met on the Internet went to work and helped us figure out if Portland might be the city for us. A few months later I started looking for jobs there. Since I’d never been to Oregon I took a one-week trip to check it out and speak to some people in person. Of course I stayed with Rudolph and his lovely family.

I talked to several companies in Portland, but the conversations that kept sticking in my mind were the ones I had with HealthSparq, a healthcare transparency company that’s part of Cambia Health Solutions. I never thought I’d work in the healthcare field, but the team’s passion and vision won me over. So on April 13th I’m starting at Healthsparq as a Director of Product. Healthsparq’s president, Scott Decker, wrote a post the other day that’s a pretty good summary of why I decided to join them. From Health Care Transparency: Opening Up the Market:

It’s important that these new transparency tools provide robust information that people want to know in a way they can make actionable. While more and more health care data is being generated and released — from personal tracking devices to government and payer data — the information won’t be useful unless it is understandable and easy to navigate. These new transparency tools should provide as complete a picture as possible of price and quality, from the moment a person begins receiving care for a specific condition to the time when they no longer require treatment.

That’s a tough UX problem, and a vision I can get behind. I’m excited about the move to a new city with new beginnings and new things to explore — and a product I can believe in.

Anyway, I’m telling you the strange story of how this all happened because I’m worried that we don’t always appreciate how cool the internet can be. My decision to start a crappy blog in 2004 eventually led to a bunch of connections with fantastic people who decided to give me a shot (remind me to tell you about the day that Francisco sent me a DM to ask if I’d like to write for Smashing Magazine). This move wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t met Jim and Rudolph online, and if they weren’t such nice people, and I can’t quite get my brain around how great that is.

We give the internet a lot of crap, and yes, it can be a vile place sometimes. But we’re moving to Portland because of relationships that were started and cemented on the internet, so I’m going to remain in awe of this technology that has the power to help us make each other’s lives so much better.