The last few weeks have been very long, but still very, very good. Almost exactly two months ago, I found myself with the opportunity to leave my employer of nearly four years, Washington State University. WSU has proven to be an excellent incubator for me over these last few years, but I know full well I had been ready to go for months, even prior to beginning my job search in earnest. At some point, I had begun to feel that the University had become an impediment to my further professional growth, and I increasingly found myself strongly disagreeing with the direction of the higher leadership at the institution, whom it seemed was continually making decisions that I felt were neither sustainable, nor fiscally responsible for a state-run institution.

While I was ready to move on, the decision to seek a new job was also strongly driven by a new opportunity my wife had created for herself. Due to an unfortunate situation with her advisor for her graduate program, she decided to stop pursuing a Ph.D. at WSU, and instead complete her Master's degree in Zoology and complete her Ph.D elsewhere. Earlier this year, she was given an excellent opportunity at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, working under Dr. Darryl Felder, a researcher focusing on decapod crustaceans. It is an amazing opportunity, that will have us moving, six days after this post, to the heart of cajun country.

As for me, I have spent the past six weeks or so working for Meebo. Meebo has been finding itself in a period of really aggressive growth over the first half of this year, with a half dozen people joining on the front-end JavaScript team alone this year, including myself. It's been an exciting place to be, and though Meebo's engineering is based in Mountain View, California and New York City, I have been lucky enough to be brought into the company as one of the first full-time remote engineers.

Working remote is definitely a change, though my experience in the open source community over the last decade or so, and especially on the YUI project over the last three or so years, had taught me a lot about working with people you communicate with primarily via e-mail and chat. Still, it has been an adjustment, as my desk is ten feet from my bed, and as my fellow YUI contributor and recent Meebody, Tony Pipkin (@apipkin) recently tweeted:

New office attire: basketball shorts and a plain white t

At Meebo, I have transitioned to being a pure JavaScript programmer. When I need a server-side component, I pass those tasks off to someone else, which is a bit awkward. I have to e a lot more proactive about making sure that my server-side counterpart is aware of my requirements early enough that they can be scheduled, since I'm not in Mountain View, I need to communicate really clearly and with written specifications, because miscommunication can result in the wrong thing being implemented because of ambiguous language.

I've been assigned to the Ads product at Meebo, which means that any where you go with the Meebo Bar, when the ad pops up, that's code I now own running. Advertising is a nuanced business, but I have long been convinced that the best model we have at scale for monetizing content is ad sales (it doesn't scale down to, say, the size of this blog, however), thought there is an incredibly amount of nuance to that business that I had no idea existed. Comments for another post, however.

In six days, Catherine and I will watch as everything we own gets loaded onto a truck, before we follow that truck out of town for a drive across the country with our two cats. The kind of change that we're looking at has grown to be incredibly intimidating, even though it's exciting. Starting work on the 25th, right after we get down there (and incidentally, possibly a week before our possessions arrive. A 6-14 day delivery window is really inconvenient).

I'll be looking to get involved in a developer group down in Lafayette, and I'm looking forward to getting familiar with the area. And I definitely plan to start blogging regularly again come August.