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.