Next week I start my new job at SmugMug!

This is old news if you follow me on Twitter. I plead laziness: I’ve spent much of the past two weeks sitting on the couch watching Magnum, P.I. on Netflix and generally avoiding any device with a physical keyboard.

During this time of reflection and relaxation, I’ve learned two things:

1. Magnum, P.I. is awesome.
2. iPads are awesome.

But seriously. SmugMug! I’m excited. This company is special in a way that’s hard to put into words.

On the day I visited, Beth the SmugChef surprised me with seven different kinds of pie. She had even scoured Felicity’s blog to find the recipe for my favorite, maple custard. When she set two plates full of pie in front of me at lunch, I knew I couldn’t possibly work anywhere else.

This feels right. I can’t wait to get started!

After five years, I will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of this month.

I’m not a fan of candy-coated, platitude-filled departure announcements that coyly avoid revealing actual opinions, so this is not one of those. I have many opinions about Yahoo!, and they have led to my decision to leave.

I’m not leaving to “explore new challenges” or “spend more time with my family”, and I’m not leaving because someone offered me a better job. I’m leaving because I no longer want to work for Yahoo!.

To be clear, I’m not leaving Yahoo! because I dislike my job, or my coworkers, or the projects I’ve been working on. I love my job. I love my coworkers. I love what I get to work on. For the past two years, I’ve had what is essentially my dream job working on YUI. Nothing I’ve ever done has been as much fun or as fulfilling as getting to wake up every morning and spend all day making one of the world’s awesomest open source JavaScript libraries a little bit awesomer.

What other job would pay me to write open source code, design, build, and perform sysadmin duties on a popular website, and even shoot and edit videos (one of my favorite hobbies)?

But as much as I love YUI, the team behind it, and the fantastic community of third-party contributors and users, I no longer believe in Yahoo! as a company. Yahoo!‘s corporate goals have taken some alarming turns recently, in particular with the reprehensible patent lawsuit against Facebook and the most recent round of senseless layoffs. Yahoo!’s actions violate my personal values and don’t reflect the values of the company I joined five years ago.

That said, my time at Yahoo! has been amazing, and I’m not exaggerating. When I joined Yahoo!, I thought I was hot shit. I wasn’t. I’ve learned and grown more as an engineer and as a person in the past five years than at any other time in my career. I’m grateful to have gotten to work on so many interesting projects with so many talented people. I don’t regret my time here.

Yahoo! has treated me well, both as an employee and as a human being. My managers and coworkers rewarded me and recognized me when I did great work and gave me honest criticism and guidance when I needed it.

When I told my manager in 2008 that living in the Bay Area wasn’t working out for me and Felicity and that I wanted to work remotely from Portland, Yahoo! was incredibly flexible and accommodating. They didn’t have to let me do that, but they did, and I’m very grateful.

When I’ve taken huge risks (like the time I developed and launched Yahoo! Search for iPhone — and announced it on my blog — without asking permission), Yahoo! has backed me up. Those gambles didn’t always pan out, and sometimes I got privately scolded, but I was never punished for pushing through the bureaucracy to do what I thought was the right thing, and in many cases I was rewarded. I respect Yahoo! for that, even though I wish it hadn’t been necessary.

I still think Yahoo! is a great place to work, and I mean that; the YUI team in particular (hint, hint). It’s just not the right place for me.

I don’t know what I’ll do next. I’m thinking about that now. If you’re looking for an awesome frontend engineer in the Portland area or are open to remote workers, get in touch.

Guy holding a clipboard knocked on the door. Said something about jobs and times being tough. Asked me to put my name on his clipboard. I told him I wasn’t interested. He insisted. I reiterated.

He assured me no emails or mailings or consequences of any kind would result, he just needed my name. I suggested he just make a name up, since that’s what I’d do anyway if he kept insisting. He told me that if people didn’t do something, things would keep getting worse. I told him I still wasn’t going to put my name on his clipboard.

“Are you apathetic?” he asked.

“Um, yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

I’m glad he noticed.

A little over three years ago, I opened a purple box containing a job offer and some boring forms to sign. It yodeled at me when I opened it. That’s when I knew I’d made the right choice in deciding to join Yahoo!.

Working on Yahoo! Search has been an incredible experience. I can now say that I’ve written code that’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. I can also say that I’ve broken code that’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world (fortunately that only happened once). During my time there I did a little bit of everything, from writing build tools and pushing pixels around for bucket tests to leading frontend development on the September 2009 Search redesign—the biggest in the history of Yahoo! Search—which the team managed to pull off in only a matter of months.

At its best, working on Search was exciting and fulfilling in a way no other job has been for me; at its worst, it was stressful and relentlessly demanding. But whether it was exciting or stressful, fulfilling or demanding, I always learned something new every day, and I got to work with some of the smartest people in the business. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what makes a thing worth doing.

It’s in this spirit that I’m launching myself on a new journey. Not an altogether different one—I’ll still be at Yahoo!—but certainly one that I expect will be both incredibly challenging and a lot of fun. As a member of the YUI team, I’ll get to work on an awesome project that I love, with awesome people from whom I will doubtless learn truly epic amounts of stuff on a daily basis.

A little over three years ago, if someone had told me I’d be this lucky, I wouldn’t have believed them.

It has been brought to my attention that the ferocious Australian Dropbear (a type of carnivorous koala known for dropping out of trees onto their prey) is particularly fond of pale, balding web developers.

In light of this new information, Felicity and I have decided to call off our move.

Last October, Felicity and I moved back to Portland, Oregon, our home of many years. We had been longing for the Pacific Northwest’s cold winter air and constant drizzly greyness since moving to California, and it felt wonderful to be home again.

Over the long winter, though, our joy gradually diminished. We were snowed in for much of December, and the permanent overcast and unavoidable moistening upon venturing outdoors have really been getting us down. At times, we’ve wondered if we would ever see the sun again, or experience the glorious feeling of our skin gently baking in a dry heat.

That’s why, after a lot of careful planning and consideration, we’ve decided to move to Portland, New South Wales. We’ll swap drizzle for sunshine and America for Australia, but without having to leave Portland behind. And, as a bonus, we’ll be just a few hours drive from our dear friends Loren and Caitlin.

I’ll continue working for Yahoo! remotely just as before, but now I’ll be one day ahead due to the time difference, which means I’ll hear the latest Microsoft takeover rumors a day before everyone else.

I’ve been working from home full time for about five months now. At times it’s been relaxing, other times it’s been stressful; sometimes convenient, sometimes less so. Here are some things I like and some I don’t.

The Good

• No commute. This is huge. My stress level dropped through the floor when I stopped having to deal with 45 minutes or more of California drivers twice a day. The extra time at the beginning and end of my workday can now be used for other things, like sleeping in or cooking dinner. I also save on gas by never having to drive anywhere.
• More time in the “zone”. Without anyone dropping by my cubicle to chat or distracting me by chatting with other coworkers nearby, I find it much easier to concentrate. Email and IM are my biggest distractions now, but they’re easier to deal with than a chatty coworker. This really adds up; I’m a lot more productive working from home than I ever was in the office.
• I eat better. I’ve lost weight over the last few months just by cutting the Yahoo! cafeteria out of my diet and eating fewer lazy microwave dinners.
• More freedom. If I want to take a break in the middle of the day to exercise, cook a meal, play with the cat, or just relax, it’s much easier than when I’m at the office. I definitely don’t take advantage of this as often as I should, but at least I know I can if I need to.

The Bad

• Harder to connect with coworkers. I knew most of my coworkers pretty well before I started working remotely, but it’s hard to establish a rapport with newer team members who joined after I moved. One project manager even asked me who I was when I started to explain something in a meeting during one of my trips to the office. She had never seen me before, so to her I was some random guy who just showed up and started acting like he knew stuff.
• Close collaboration is harder. IM and IRC are okay for loose collaboration, such as when several developers are working on different parts of an application or are acting as individual contributors to various projects. But for close collaboration in which multiple developers need to work on or review the same piece of code, or when a cross-functional team needs to collaborate on hashing out a design change or a feature spec, the inability to be in the same room is frustrating.
• Meetings suck more. I attend roughly the same number of meetings now as I did before, only now I do so by phone, using Adobe Connect for screen sharing when necessary. In addition to all the usual reasons why meetings suck, remote meetings add crappy sound quality and an inability to see or hear the reactions of the people on the other end of the line when you’re speaking.

The Blurry Line Between Work and Play

I write code for a living. I also write code as a hobby. This means I often spend all day sitting at a computer writing code; the first part of the day for work, the second part for fun. It’s easy to let the work part of my day extend into what should be the fun part of my day, so I have to set certain boundaries. I’ve evolved a few life hacks that help.

First, I have two laptops: one is my work laptop, one is my personal laptop. I only use the work laptop for work, and I only use the personal laptop for non-work. When I’m done with work for the day, I turn off my work laptop and put it away to avoid the temptation to check my work email or something silly like that, which would likely result in me getting sucked back into work when I should be relaxing.

Second, when I’m working, I work in my home office with the door closed. When I’m not working but am still doing computery things, I either open the door to my office or go sit on the couch with my personal laptop. The open/closed status of my office door helps change the feel of the room from a place of business to a part of my house, and when even that’s not enough, relaxing on the couch usually does the trick. I’m pretty sure the cat has picked up on this too; she rarely bothers me when I’m working, but she seems to know she’s more likely to get attention when I’m not working.

Finally, I don’t work on weekends or holidays, period. No matter what. Even if I’m bored out of my skull and would rather be working. I’ve been tempted, but so far I’ve always managed to resist. I know that as soon as I start letting work intrude on my days off, I’ll launch myself down a slippery slope.

All things considered, I do prefer working remotely, and I’ve found that flying to California every six weeks to spend five days working in the office helps mitigate the drawbacks.

Goddammit. I was hoping to avoid having to post navel-gazing chain meme crap like this by not befriending other bloggers, but I guess I slipped up somewhere because I got tagged. Now there’s nothing left to do but grit my teeth, power through it, and then tag a bunch of other poor bastards in retribution.

Things you (probably) didn’t know about me

1. I was named “Most likely to be the next Bill Gates” in my high school yearbook. Which could indicate either that people thought I was a huge dork, or that I would get crazy rich. I suspect it was the latter (thankfully), since, on Silly Awards Day at the end of my senior year, my homeroom teacher gave me the “Student whose Porsche I will most likely be washing in five years” award.
2. Yearbook notwithstanding, my money management skills sucked so much after I moved out on my own that I occasionally went weeks without being able to buy food despite having a very nice salary. Eating cold spam with soy sauce because it’s the last food in the house and it’s a week to the next paycheck taught me valuable lessons about managing my spending. Being laid off when the first tech bubble burst taught me even more valuable lessons. Now I’m much smarter about what I do with my money. I still spend it on silly things, but only silly things I can afford.
3. I was nearly run over by a dump truck. After saying “Oh shit” and then spending several seconds thinking, “Hey, I was right all along! My last words really did turn out to be ‘oh shit’!”, I realized I could avoid being run over by taking a few steps back. Which I did.
4. As a wee lad, I was once a clothes model in a Japanese magazine. I’m pretty sure Mom still has copies of the magazine somewhere, which means the scans will eventually end up on Flickr or Facebook. At least I declined to model underwear, unlike my friend Dan.
5. I was an extra in the Benicio Del Toro/Tommy Lee Jones flop The Hunted. I was working as a web developer for the movie’s extras casting director at the time, and he insisted that I spend a day as an extra so I’d understand the business. I was in two scenes: a wide shot of Benicio Del Toro’s standin riding a stolen bicycle across the grass in Portland’s Waterfront Park, and a close tracking shot in which Benicio himself shoves past me and some other park-goers as he runs from Tommy Lee Jones. The close shot didn’t make it into the movie, and in the wide shot I’m a blueish dot in the distance. By the way, if anyone ever asks you if you’d like to be an extra in a movie, kick them in the crotch and run away.
6. My upper lip twitches involuntarily if I drop something I’m fiddling with, like a pencil. No idea why. It also happens if I see someone else do this. Even on TV. Even when I know it’s coming.
7. Once I was eating in a diner and some dude dropped a spoon so I flipped out and killed the whole town. Oh wait, no, that wasn’t me. That was a ninja.

Who wants to know about me

Sara Golemon, my coworker and (when I’m actually in California) cube neighbor at Yahoo!.

Tag, you’re it

• Felicity Shoulders
• Loren Bruns
• Steve “Mookie” Kong
• Luke Smith
• Chris Chan
• Sam Sanchez
• Stoyan Stefanov

The rules of the game

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

In November I wrote about how Chase Auto Finance lost the title to my car and was unable to send it to the Oregon DMV so I could register the car after moving here from California. As a result of their incompetence, I’m technically breaking the law by residing in Oregon and owning a car that’s still registered in another state.

Today I got two letters from Chase. The first one, dated December 18th, says their records indicate they sent the title to someone (either me or the DMV, they’re not sure who) and goes on to stress, with some urgency, that it is apparently my responsibility to tell them where they sent said title.

The second letter, dated December 19th, says that the title was sent to the DMV and makes no reference to the first letter.

On Sunday we awoke to find our neighborhood buried under several inches of freshly fallen snow, a once-a-year occurrence in the Portland area. Naturally, I couldn’t resist rushing outside to snap photos.

The snow continued to fall most of Sunday and remained on Monday. The sun returned, but temperatures stayed below freezing and the top layers of snow melted by the sun mostly turned into ice. Neighborhood children designated our driveway a sledding zone.

Tuesday saw the emergence of hungry critters eager to feast on the insects and worms chilled and exposed by the melting snow, including an opportunistic squirrel who scurried down from the treetops to seize an unguarded persimmon. He proceeded to devour his prize from a safe vantage point, seemingly unconcerned by my paparazzic invasion of his privacy.

Weather reports call for more snow tomorrow and this weekend, possibly lasting until Christmas Day or even longer, which would make this the longest stretch of snowy weather I’ve seen in over ten cumulative years of living in Portland. Looks like we moved back just in time.