Having lived in Texas for 30+ years and now happily living in southern California, I feel pretty qualified in saying that my personal quality of life is dramatically better in California.
The cost of living is higher, but I get a tremendous amount of value for the extra costs and wouldn't move back to Texas for any amount of money at this point. Los Angeles is a very safe city for its size, I live in a comfortable, walkable neighborhood and I just got back from a run through a beautiful, well-maintained city park. My neighborhood is diverse, my representatives care about what is happening, and the city and state government generally try to make things better for the people who live here, even if they don't always succeed. I rarely felt that to be true in my 30+ years in Texas.
Austin is a great city, but the cost of living is high enough now that it is very hard to justify it vs. the dramatically higher quality of life, access to nature and culture, and incredible weather that you get in southern California.
I'm hacking on Trailbound, a hiking and backpacking planning tool. The goal is combining a light version of the routing capability of Caltopo or GaiaGPS with more granular "leg" mapping based on how I learned to plan off trail trips and sharing functions that make it easy for my wife to know where I'm going to be, who I'm with, and who to contact if I'm not back in touch when I said I would be.
Its been a blast to build. At one point I was hosting my own ORS server but that's extremely silly to do when Mapbox has a very generous free tier. Learning about all of the open source tooling and open data available in the mapping world has been incredible.
The cost of the Hetzner box it runs on isn't much more than a Caltopo pro subscription with the added bonus of being much easier to share with non-hikers.
No marketing site, no onboarding, or any real UX attention paid to the app at this point, it is mostly Just For Me and will probably remain that way once I land a job again.
I'm starting to chip away at an iOS app so I can get offline access to maps and routes, but I'm not a Swift dev so the going is slow.
The cost of living is higher, but I get a tremendous amount of value for the extra costs and wouldn't move back to Texas for any amount of money at this point. Los Angeles is a very safe city for its size, I live in a comfortable, walkable neighborhood and I just got back from a run through a beautiful, well-maintained city park. My neighborhood is diverse, my representatives care about what is happening, and the city and state government generally try to make things better for the people who live here, even if they don't always succeed. I rarely felt that to be true in my 30+ years in Texas.
Austin is a great city, but the cost of living is high enough now that it is very hard to justify it vs. the dramatically higher quality of life, access to nature and culture, and incredible weather that you get in southern California.