New employment!
In October last year I, along with everyone else on my team and a bunch of other folks all got laid off from Unity. It wasn't the first time I'd been through layoffs, but it was the first time I got caught.
Obviously it was rather unwelcome news, but I wasn't too dispirited - I was lucky enough to be in a financial situation where it wouldn't cause me any immediate financial hardship. I've never had too much trouble finding a job, and I really hoped that would continue. However, I'd never found myself looking for a job at a time when so many industry colleagues had also been laid off recently so I was worried that perhaps this time would be different. Thankfully that turned out not to be the case.
During my jobsearch I spoke to a bunch of companies, but the most exciting one was Valve, and I began working there in January this year. I started off working on DOTA 2, but have since moved on to another project. Unlike most Valve employees I work out of their tiny California office in Emeryville, rather than the huge and fancy office in Belleview, but I go up there to visit every six weeks or so.
Valve is quite a strange company in some ways, but my new colleagues have been lovely and made me feel very welcome. I was relieved to find out that 4.5 years as a manager hadn't completely ruined my coding ability, although it has been interesting coming back to C++ when the vast majority of my experience with it has been in C++98 and C++03 style codebases.
Also, the free vacation to Hawaii was amazing.