Ch-ch-ch changes
Filed in: Blobbing
August 3, 2011
Professionally, I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet. I started learning HTML/CSS and ExpressionEngine when I was 27, learning PHP at 28, and had the honor of joining the ExpressionEngine dev team at 29. I spent hour after hour studying and trying to get better, and continue to do so. With my background in music, I try to approach a programming task in a similar fashion to learning a new tune. I got an extremely late start in this industry, considering someone like Pascal started programming before he was 10. My approach is that the end result is to do something beautiful, but there are interesting challenges and problems to solve to get there. The ii-V-I in E sucks, so I need to practice it for hours on end in order to do something beautiful on a ballad in that key.
So the real point of this post is, after many very long conversations with my family, I have decided to take an extended leave of absense from EllisLab. This decision has been exceedingly difficult for me, and most probably consider me a complete nutjob for doing this. Working for EllisLab and being a core developer for ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and MojoMotor is a dream job. However, the best thing about the company culture at EllisLab is it's preached that we work to live, not live to work. So that being said, my reasons for this are purely personal. After speaking to Les and Jones, they, along with the rest of the staff have been nothing but supportive of me and offered guidance that helped me and my family make my decision.
My last three years as a part of the EllisLab team have been amazing. My favorites on a long list of highlights would be:
- When I took the mic from Lisa at our 2009 SXSW party and started announcing during our prize giveaway to a crowd of about 800 people.. Leslie (then President) Camacho told me he was scared to death when he was in a private developers meeting and heard that a part time TSS was suddenly the voice and face of the company. In the end, it all worked out, and I thought it was awesome.
- That same SXSW. I met everyone on staff face to face for the first time. I introduced myself to Rick Ellis and he said "I'm sorry, how do I know you?" While this did damage my ego a bit, I along with the rest of the staff still give him massive amounts of grief over it to this day.
- In late 2010, Pascal and I rewrote the EE2 publish controller in 2 weeks. We reduced it by about 2,000 lines of code.
- Derek Jones taught me the Unblockable Move®. I then learned to block it.
To my comrads at arms on the dev team. During my absence, please remember the following:
- Hear me whining when you write a line of code over 78 characters, excluding a nasty regex. (I really wish PEP 8 could somehow apply to PHP)
- Beat me on the number of commits to the EE repo soon.
- Never stop remembering you make it possible for people to do amazing things on the internet. Let that be your motivation and keep kicking ass.
- Make trouble on behalf of the community. Les really loves it.
Thanks to Rick Ellis for his little "idea" and brilliant vision that sparked a passion in me. This, coupled with hours of hard work lead from a completely miserable, thankless dead-end job in the music industry to here and now, with endless possibilities in front of me. From the bottom of my heart, I am eternally grateful.
Lastly, there are some really amazing and exciting things around the corner for ExpressionEngine. Between James bringing the Dazzle Thunder and some awesome new stuff being worked on, this is a great time for EllisLab. I'm totally stoked and you should be too.
So in the time being, I'm going to be doing some freelance work building things in ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, Django and Tornado as well as focusing on some personal pet projects I've been wanting to do. I'll also be continuing my sysadmin/programming work for EngineHosting. Other than that, I'm going to be living and loving life.
Thanks all, and see you at EECI and CICon!