OK, it is not the end of the world yet, but a leaked screenshot of the latest Yahoo all-hands shows that delicious has no bright future in the company.
So in order to preserve the years of work I put into this web service of awesome I am backing up my data. There are a few simple ways:
Go to the terminal and do a “curl https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml” to get an XML file of your bookmarks
Last week I handed in my notice at Yahoo to leave them for pastures new. I’ve been with the company for almost 5 years (which would have given me a gumball machine) and I have to say that I do not regret a single moment.
So yeah, I quit! Anybody for a Hot Piece of Engineer/Evangelist?
So yeah, another Yahoo jumps the ship – I can already see people talking about talent bleed and all that. To all the people who blog, write and publish that Yahoo is not a technology company and there is no innovation going on I can only say: bullshit.
Yahoo rocks as a tech company
The amount of talented people I was lucky enough to work with is one of my best takeaways from the time I had at Yahoo. The amount of innovation and kick-ass tech being produced is staggering, too. Yahoo doesn’t blow its own horn about it enough, that is all. If, as a web developer you look at the Yahoo homepage and see the JS implementation and the performance you will see what I mean. Yahoo also publishes and gives out the findings for free. The design pattern library, YUI and the performance guidelines can be used by you to be as awesome without much work.
In Yahoo I learnt a lot I previously thought I knew already – having come to the company with already 8 years of experience. I got a chance to hone my speaking and training skills and I witnessed the birth of amazing technologies like GeoPlanet, YUI, YQL, YSlow, BrowserPlus and all the other things you probably miss out on if you see Yahoo as a huge ad company on its way out like some of the rag mags of our tech world love to paint it.
It is about the people
The thing that kept me for a long time in Yahoo are its people. You can have fun working there. Travelling the world and visiting different offices I was amazed just how much local flavour is retained rather than being a Silicon Valley drone someplace else. It is also OK to be outspoken in the company and nobody gets stopped from blogging, tweeting or writing their own thoughts on their own server. Going through a few interviews I found this not to be the norm at all with other companies like Yahoo.
I find myself being in contact with all of the people I care about outside the company channels and there is no way that I will not use these connections in the future to share great ideas, get inspiration and bounce off previews of the things I will release. There are far too many people to thank personally for the time I had in Yahoo and this is not for public – you know who you are.
Yahoo has its problems, and given time I will write about a few I can mention. None of these are really surprising given that they are a big company. Putting too many people together to solve a problem will always result in a lot of noise vs. signal – it is simply human nature.
So why am I quitting?
It is actually very simple – my job is done here. I’ve spent the last two years evangelising Yahoo and left over a hundred different presentations, numerous blog posts, demos and screencasts and other info on its technologies and how they fit into the larger picture of technology or how you can use them to make your life easier.
I find myself repeating what I said before and getting congratulated for getting people excited about technologies like YQL just to get the final blow of “I had no idea Yahoo did anything like that! I thought you guys were almost dead”. I don’t mind the misinformation – albeit wrong – I mind that I feel I ran in circles telling people about the real Yahoo just not to be backed up by other official statements and actions of the company.
I proposed to start a full evangelism department in the company (based on requests from engineers which also lead to me writing the Developer Evangelism Handbook), training up engineers to talk to the world and get them excited and offer evangelism and training as a natural evolution for engineers who want to talk about what they do. Right now Yahoo has two full-time developer evangelists: Tom Hughes-Croucher in the US and me for the world. There were no plans for that to change in the near future so maybe a change is in order.
The other thing is that I have been in the company too long. As I mentioned in my talk at Fronteers this year it is amazing how much better you work when you concentrate on the good things about your job. If you’ve been at one place for a long time you start to get tainted and always see the “this will not work as it didn’t before” instead of the “fuck yeah, let’s do this”.
The good news is that the man who brought me to Yahoo in the first place, Murray Rowan, is now in charge of YDN international, so I am confident he will find a replacement for me soon.
So what’s next?
Later today I will publish a chapter of a book I started but never went anywhere – so this is one of the goodies I will leave immediately. Update this is now live get the book chapter here.
As for the new job…
You know, what? I keep that announcement for tomorrow. I have a new job and I am as excited as a 12 year old in a candy shop with a free puppy section. There is a hint in the source code of the Wait-till-i.com start page and I can say that I am very much looking forward to being Wash and playing with Dinosaurs:
I am also very much looking forward to being able to rant and realise that it is me who can and will fix the thing I am annoyed about:
Thanks!
Again, me leaving Yahoo is not on a bad note – I just see myself in the way of people who should get a chance to shine. I will still be rooting from the sidelines and talk about their stuff when I like it. My last day is the 24th of November, my last official Yahoo gig is YUIConf in Sunnyvale and I will be at Science Hack Day in Palo Alto. Then I will go to Jordan to talk to the Maktoob people about the wonderful world of Yahoo Tech and on the first of December my new job starts – with me brewing a coffee in my own flat in North London and writing my first mails to the people I had so much fun with during the job interview.
Die letzen zwei Tage hatte ich einen “Hit and Run” Auftritt bei der WebTechCon in Mainz auf dem Weg von Fronteers zu Paris Web. Hier sind die Slides meiner Vortraege:
Bastelstunde mit dem Web und freien Daten
Mein erster Vortrag war ein “Night Talk” da ich zu spaet angekommen bin. Daher aenderte ich die Abfolge meiner Vortraege da der Geolocation Inhalt zu technisch war. Der folgende Vortrag ging darueber, wie man mit kostenlosen Datensaetzen und Bausteinen ganz einfach interessante Web-Produkte erstellen kann:
Beide Vortraege wird es auch bald als Audio Aufnahmen geben.
Mehr das naechste mal
Leider muss ich sagen das ich kaum Zeit hatte die Konferenz zu erleben und entschuldige mich dafuer nur als Durchreisender aufgetreten zu sein. Das ich eine Erkaeltung hatte/habe hat auch nicht geholfen. Ich hoffe, das ich trotzdem ein paar Leute dazu bewegen konnte, mal was Neues zu machen.
Researching something on the web can be pretty annoying. Search engines get better every year, but there is a whole world of social sites that are not indexed. For example if I search for a nice photo of a red panda I use Google image search. If I want to use this photo later on I am better off using Flickr or Picasa and see what license the photo is.
You can do the data junkie part and use it in the YQL console:
This can be annoying though, especially as you cannot see the photos and videos. This is why I put together a research interface on top of the Yahoo Firehose:
Notice that I am keeping the state of your last search by storing it in local storage when your browser supports it – this can be useful for larger searches.
Just having spent a lot of time at the amazing open hack day in Bangalore, India I found that most of the questions about starting a hack using Yahoo technology revolved around a few issues:
How do I access data on the web/from web services?
