It’s been one hell of a year for me. Jaxon is now a year old and doing great. I got to spend alot of time with my family, almost 6 weeks by my count. I did some traveling too: I was in Taiwan for two weeks in May; I spoke at IPC (Germany) in October, and traveled through Bavaria and met some great people. I did some really cool stuff at work. Again, it was a great year.

But, I think as humans we ultimately can’t leave well-enough alone, and being human (yes, debatable), something needed to change. Due to some personal and professional reasons, I decided to leave Yahoo! to pursue other opportunities. I was there 3 1/2 years and I had some great times. I worked with really smart, passionate people and worked on projects with major impact. Yahoo! was a great experience for me - they moved me out here, gave me fun stuff to work on, allowed me to pursue my technical interests and even do some traveling, all on their dime. For that, I’m very sincere when I say, “Thanks.”.

So, why did I have to leave? Well, to paraphrase a thoughtful colleague’s blog post, Yahoo! and I had reached a crossroad where I really couldn’t “add” to Yahoo! and pursue my current interests at the same time. There is plenty of work to be done, but for me to take it on would mean me putting aside my own aspirations. While I do believe that my interests and Yahoo!’s immediate needs will converge again one day, it’s just not today, and so, I needed to move on. With all of that said, I really, REALLY want to thank upper management for trying really, really hard to find a position for me that met my needs - Thanks.

So, what’s next? How can one top working on the Number 1 News site in the world? Work on stuff in space, of course!

I’m now the Senior Platform Software Engineer at Skybox Imaging. Skybox is a venture-backed startup that’s building satellities (yes, we literally build them in house) better, faster, cheaper and smaller than anyone has before. So what am I doing there? In short, I’m responsible (solely ATM) for storing, processing and serving all of the data (video, photos and text) we get from the satellites.

This is an awesome opportunity for me for several reasons:

And of course, there are the perks:

It is going to be a fun year. We’ve got lots of cool toys to play with (we have our first satellite dish *inside* the office) and some serious $$$ behind us. Of course, I’ll miss working with my friends at Y!, but we’re all in the same town and I’m sure we’ll stay in touch. I wish Y! the best and do believe they are now on the right course - 2010 was a planning/design/initial implementation year and 2011 will further implement that vision. And I look forward to the day that Y! News publishes the article describing our first launch - look out for it!

We’re finally settled in and I thought I’d talk about some of the cool things going on at Yahoo, some of which I’ve been directly involved in.

Hack Day

Several times a year (it might be once a quarter) the company sponsors an internal “Hack Day” for company engineers (this is different from the Open Hack Days that the company sponsors which should be coming up at the end of September). Basically, you have 24 hours to come up with something cool and present it to the judges and your peers. To be clear, this is a work-sanctioned event - all work stuffAlthough I can’t go into specifics, I am very proud of my team’s Hack Day project. Admittedly, I contributed a small (but very prominent, I must say) piece to the Hack given my schedule (my cats were coming in from NY AND my furniture was being delivered all within those 24 hours) but we did make the top 25 and were actually singled out by Ramus on an internal mailing list as a hack that he really enjoyed. Very cool. Congrats to the team!

YSlow (no involvement, but we use it all the time)

Hopefully you’ve heard about YSlow. YSlow is a Firebug extension to help with site performance. YSlow scores are taken seriously inside Yahoo and it is a good (but certainly not the only) indicator of your sites performance. Read more about it here.

Yahoo Go for TV (no involvement, but very cool technology and killer release party)

The mashup between TV and Internet is inevitable and Go for TV brings it that much closer. See your favorite Yahoo content while watching TV and also take advantage of the DVR features. Windows only right now (hey, Linux folks, they’re hiring engineers for the Linux port, get me those resumes!). Find out the scoop and download from the Yahoo! Go site.

And for all the latest with Yahoo, you don’t need to wait for me, just check out Next @ Yahoo.

…and some fun stuff….

Great America

The Media Engineering Group (to which I belong) was given the afternoon off and free passes to Great America. We had a great year with some outstanding accomplishments and this was a awesome way of the higher-ups to say thanks to the people who make it happen. Engineers are actually the folks “on the ground” when it comes to bringing a project to the finish line. The idea folks, the designers, operations, customers, special teams have all had their input and requirements, but really, it is the engineer that is given all of this and told to make it work. I’ve seen this quite often throughout my career and it is really nice to not only be recognized for the actual job that is done but to be appreciated in that way. Yahoo is good to us like that.

As many of you know, I’m a big baby when it comes to amusement park rides but I still managed to have a good time with the team.

Camp Yahoo

Also, we just had Camp Yahoo a couple of weeks ago. Camp Yahoo is the company picnic and was held at the San Mateo events center. Lots of food, games and rides, and of course, free for employees and their families. Heck, Elissa and I even got to ride a Segway. Evan? Sorry, kid, you don’t meet the height requirement just yet.