Three Years in Review
It's been a busy 3 years or so.
Yes, this promises to be one of those posts I seem to keep writing. It's not quite LiveJournal material, but it'll be completely devoid of code or any notable geekery—so feel free to move along.
In late 2005 to early 2006, after a busy and stressful Autoshow season working at Organic, I finished a book on del.icio.us. Meanwhile, the girl and I prepared for a wedding and a honeymoon in San Francisco. Unexpectedly, I got offered a job at Yahoo! a month or so before getting married. We got married on June 9, 2006. We had a honeymoon in San Francisco. Then, less than a month after that, we moved to Santa Clara and I started at Yahoo! working on del.icio.us.
Three months after moving to Santa Clara, I got injured and lived in a Vicodin-fueled haze on the couch for a month or two. I limped around through to Spring 2007, back to work and occasionally trying to make it to geek events like SuperHappyDevHouse. At Yahoo!, we started complete ground-up rewrite work on Delicious 2 with a much expanded team. I went to Hack Day London, but couldn't say much about Delicious. We continued working on Delicious 2 throughout the Summer of 2007.
My Dad passed away in August of 2007, and we flew back to Michigan to take care of things. From remote, at my Mom's house in Michigan, I worked a little on Delicious 2. It seemed so close to launch, and I wanted distractions. Then, after a month or so back in CA, I started work on a new JavaScript book. Work on Delicious 2 trudged on. I took on more work for the JavaScript book. We didn't go out much at all, and weren't all that happy. The holidays were particularly hard.
Around that point, my wife and I got fed up with our state of affairs in the Bay Area and decided it was time for things to change. Having gotten injured and couch-bound right at the beginning probably didn't help, but we never quite felt at home in California. I still have a lot of starry-eyed regard for the birthplace of Silicon Valley and all, but for us it's maybe a better place to visit than to live.
In early 2008, my wife found us a wonderful house in Michigan. Work on Delicious 2 hadn't yet completed, but I left Yahoo! anyway. I changed jobs twice in one month, finally landing at Mozilla. After 6 weeks or so of working from Mountain View, we left California and moved into our new house back in our home state. Relatives and old friends were suddenly thousands of miles closer, and we got out of the house more in the first 2 weeks than we had in the previous 2 years. Telecommuting for Mozilla presented me with a steep learning curve, but an undeniably great working arrangement.
Finally, more than half a year later, I'm still at Mozilla and they seem to like me there so far. Also, part of my work on the JavaScript book has made it to the shelves in the form of the Concise Guide to Dojo. This past summer, Delicious 2 finally launched—and though I'm sad not to have been there when the finish line was crossed, I still think leaving was the best decision for me and mine. We've settled into the new house, and I've been gradually trying to leave the hermitage to get into the happenings in the Ann Arbor / Detroit area, of which there seem to be an interestingly growing number.
And, that's pretty much the past 3 years' exhausting adventure so far... what's next?
Archived Comments
I'm glad we had you on the team. You deserved to be as much (if not more) a part of that celebration as people who were there. I'm glad for your sake you made the decision that was best for you though.
It's funny how Chris and I will talk about some problem with the architecture of the frontend code and sure enough we'll find a bug that you filed that echoes the same sentiment ;)
Happy New Years. Have a great 2009.
@Dave: Aw shucks, man, thanks. :) I've got to say, as a civilian user of Delicious, I'm glad you guys are still taking care of business. Whatever frustrations I had with the process, I was happy being on the team with you.