There are so many things to love about Flickr and especially about working at Flickr that I initially thought myself crazy for even considering leaving. But with time came sanity and I saw the pros for leaving start to outweigh the cons.

The folks at Flickr are without a doubt the most talented group I’ve ever had the honor of working with and I will miss them all. Flickr as a whole is a dream, a place with passionate staff matching passionate members and no shortage of new ground to break into, but my piece of this puzzle was not exactly right for me. I developed the new Flickr Uploadr desktop client as an open-source, extendable app for getting your photos and metadata onto Flickr. The project had everything I wanted — new technology, technical difficulty, performance concerns, design quirks and the goal of open-source extendability. But for all of that it had a fatal flaw — I am not a desktop software developer.

Thinking more forwardly, “I am not a desktop software developer” started to say what I really meant: “I do not want to be a desktop software developer.” Selfish personal preference.

This job at OpenDNS has all the ingredients of a good time in my book — C++, maybe some map/reduce, I/O bottlenecks, oh-my-god-databases-are-slow and a whole lot of networking (the TCP/IP kind). The people there are awesome just like Flickr’s and I have no doubt I’ll become just as attached to them.

(Housekeeping: it looks like the XULRunner saga on rcrowley.org has come to an end for the time being. I almost guarantee I’ll be back to dabbling with it sometime, though, since it’d be a shame for all that practice to go to waste. Don’t count on Windows XPCOM, though.)