San Francisco did something to me man...

Mindset Change Preceding the trip

Over the past 5 years, I’ve gone through a substantial amount of mindset change (bulk of it being in the last 2 years especially). Some of it you’ve read about on here (see Why I Quit Alcohol) and some I have yet to catalog (more to come). One of the biggest mindset changes I have had is around the idea of living in a larger city. In this case, one as big as San Francisco or New York City with a large tech presence or what I would personally call “more people like me who can have smart and technical conversations”.

Being based in Lubbock, it’s hard to find friends — or really anyone outside of work — that I can relate to or talk with about tech, AI, or software engineering that’s not brain dead or responds “oh that’s cool man” with zero follow-up interest. And when your idea of a social life isn’t “let’s go to the townie bar or so and so’s house, drink, and do the same thing we did last weekend” there isn’t much left to do here.

For the past year I've been sitting with the same set of questions: What would living or working in SF/NYC actually look like? How much could I stand to make? How much would I learn being in a major tech and cultural hub? It was just a thought — my plan was to make a trip to NYC the first "live test" of it. But God had a different plan.

Around March 2026, my employer asked me to attend Snowflake Summit 2026 in San Francisco. Snowflake is an enterprise data analytics platform (I may write a full article on it) used across a lot of different industries. I hesitated at first, but ultimately decided it was a great chance to answer some of the questions I'd been turning over about being in a place like that. For anyone who doesn't know, the Bay Area is the heart of Silicon Valley, home to a massive concentration of tech companies (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta — you name it). There's also a great Mike Judge comedy of the same name about the lives of software engineers out there; I've dropped one of my favorite clips below.

Off to SF and Snowflake Summit

So off I went. They had an attendance of over 30,000 people. All of them talking about everything related to Snowflake/AI/Software/Data. I had the opportunity to speak to a lot of the engineers that worked on Snowflake as well as got to sit in hands-on labs and speaker sessions. I learned a ton about the platform and got to bring a lot of applicable knowledge back to my workplace.

One of the other things I noticed during the event was that everyone was “tuned in” to everything going on outside of the conference. An example of this was the Anthropic IPO that was announced that Monday. Immediately, everyone in my close vicinity reacted to it and it became a topic of conversation. Same goes with the RTX Spark laptops that Jensen Huang (NVIDIA CEO) announced in collaboration with Microsoft. Being in Silicon Valley where it was all happening felt so surreal. Overall, Snowflake Summit was a really neat event and I hope to attend again in the future.

Beyond the Conference

Beyond the conference, I spent a lot of time exploring SF. I hit the usual tourist traps like Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge but also got the opportunity to try some hole-in-the-wall local food joints. Outside of food and other tourist hotspots, air quality was also 100x better then what I am normally used to (Lubbock has a lot of dirt and I immediately broke out in allergies when I got home lol), the temperature was a brisk 65-68°F throughout the week, and it was really easy to get around (if I didn’t walk, I Waymo’d).

It wasn’t all perfect, there was some “blight” and homeless activity but it wasn’t near as bad as what Fox News would have you believe. The streets weren’t covered in poop or needles. It was manageable to work around at best and at worst, you just didn’t go to a certain street or block (I avoided the Tenderloin district).

Coming Home

My first thought once I sat down in my seat for the flight home was, I have to find a way to come back. Being somewhere where everyone is trying to build something on the cutting edge of tech and AI — instead of complaining that "the world sucks" — did something to me.

Back to that mindset shift: early in my career, the idea of being career-complacent was comforting. I'd clock in, do my 8 or 9 hours, go home, and switch off. Now I'm almost the opposite. I've come to enjoy working late into the night chasing down a machine learning problem on my own, or sharpening my skills with coding agents, or whatever else haha. My mentality has shifted hard, and I'm willing to go yard to build things and push my programming and AI skills further. My time in SF put a 10x multiplier on that. It was a great "live test," and while I'm not sure I could fully commit to living there, it made the idea a lot more feasible. I loved it, and I really hope I get the chance to go back.