Starting at OpenDNS today 2008/04/08
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.)
Comments (16)
Congrats buddy!
I think you've made a big impact while at Flickr and I've no doubt you'll do great things at OpenDNS. Dave's lucky to steal you =)
— Dimitry — 2008/04/08 8:12 am
Congrats on the new job.
— David Hall — 2008/04/08 8:57 am
Welcome Richard! We are happy to have you as a part of our team here at OpenDNS!
- Daniel
— Daniel — 2008/04/08 9:20 am
Welcome! :)
— Mike D — 2008/04/08 10:50 am
Congrats, Richard! Sorry we won't get your XULRunner updates which were awesome. But, much happiness at the new gig.
— Marc Hedlund — 2008/04/08 11:47 am
Woot. Lemme know how it goes. Looks like we (Pownce) just got that office space in the brickhouse building, so we'll have to hang out for lunch sometime.
— Mike Malone — 2008/04/08 1:34 pm
Congrats man. David U just got a kick ass coder.
— Andrew Mager — 2008/04/08 2:03 pm
Yo! Congrats man -- I know you'll do well. Keep in touch with the little people.
— Jason — 2008/04/08 5:25 pm
Indeed, we're stoked to have you become a part of the team. As a means of celebrating, I expect tomorrow to be yet another record day. :-)
— David Ulevitch — 2008/04/08 7:50 pm
I knew it was only a matter of time. when you and David got together you were always talking IT stuff and reminiscing about WashU times. Congrats man!
— Paul Stamatiou — 2008/04/08 8:24 pm
What language is flickr uploader written in? It kicks ass.
— Choppen5 — 2008/04/08 8:57 pm
Haha. Don't lie. You left because Yahoo is going to be snatched up by Microsoft and fire all of our asses.
— Bruce W — 2008/04/09 11:43 am
@Choppen5: It's written in Haskell. Since it's GPLv2, you can see if I'm telling the truth by downloading the source from http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploadr/
— David Hall — 2008/04/09 7:00 pm
Congrats on the new job, Cola! Sorry about the delay. I apparently don't read your blog enough.
— Corey — 2008/04/11 9:31 pm
[... I guess they also want to use it to hire a new XUL guru because the author of their new Uploadr, Rich Crowley, has left and is now working for OpenDNS. [...]
— philwilson.org » Blog Archive » code.flickr.com, Flickr Uploadr 3.0 and XUL — 2008/04/16 3:34 pm
hey! i just read your post on code.flickr.com! congrats on something new. (i work on the same floor as you, at swivel. feel free to say howdy.)
— huned — 2008/04/18 12:21 pm