Monday was my first day in my new role as Prinicipal UI Engineer for Brightcove and I'm quite excited to begin this new chapter of not only my career, but my life as well.  Brightcove is headquartered in Cambridge, MA which means the first major physical relocation in over 20 years for me.  More importantly, it's the first time I'll be living outside of Atlanta as an adult.

There were may reasons I chose to accept this opportunity and uproot my life to come here. Most notably, I believe the word "opportunity" truly applies.  I spent a good portion of my half-day interview in Cambridge in early October talking about where I want my career to go; and not just anecdotally via the typical "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" interview question.  We talked about how my desired path can fit into the Brightcove structure and culture and we talked about how to leverage my current skill sets to make those transitions possible. While I grew tremendously in my time at ATC, I believe I'll grow much more, and much more quickly, and Brightcove.

I also saw the opportunity to come to a company that sits on the leading edge of technology on the web; and a company where initiative would be embraced from engineers rather than stifled.  And the company showed tremendous faith in me throughout the whole Interview and Negotiation process.

The fact that they use the Scrum methodology certainly didn't hurt things either.  Oh, and they have some of the world's best Flex developers for me to learn from as well.  :)

All of these things, and the general feeling of excitement I had when I walked out of that interview, made it a very easy decision for me to pack up and move to New England.  When I arrived for my first day, I found that people know who I am, are happy I'm there, and are ready to look to me for leadership in the UI Engineering discipline.

I look forward to this adventure!

Today is my last day at AutoTrader.com.  I've been here just shy of two years and it's been a fantastic experience. I've learned, grown, and met some wonderful people with whom I hope to remain friends for years.  At ATC, I was able to truly able to embrace the discipline of UI Engineering and learn so much from so many people that I'm ready to take that next step.

The first year was simply the best work experience I've had. I met people who twisted my mind in ways it'd never been twisted before. I learned about enterprise software architecture and the unique challenges faced in that type of environment as opposed to client work. I attended my first major web conference in nearly 10 years, and, of course, I made some fantastic friends along the way. I participated as a lead engineer in one of the greatest feats of enterprise web engineering ever accomplished; one that won't be talked about in engineering circles, but if you were there, you knew what we accomplished was truly incredible.

Over time, I came to the realization that despite my and others' efforts, the company would never shed it's very conservative nature.  And frankly, it's hard to argue that potentially putting off many millions of unique visitors a month by becoming more "cutting edge" is a great idea when revenues are at stake. But the inescapable fact, as famously explained by one of the executives, is that "AutoTrader.com is an advertising company," not an engineering company. As such, after a time, an engineer is going to begin to feel somewhat "stifled" in that environment. Once I began to feel as if it were sapping my motivation, I knew it was time to move on.

All that said, I did not look for a new opportunity; one fell into my lap at the right time and I've chosen to seize it.  I'll write about my new company in a separate post; and I'm very exciting about the whirlwind of change it means for my life!

Goodbye AutoTrader.com and the wonderful people I've met there along the way; you will very sincerely be missed.

I spent September 11-14 in Boston for jQuery Conference 2009.  For $150, this conference was probably the best value I've seen in a conference.  Packed with great speakers on great topics, it was more than I was expecting.

I spent most of my time tweeting the event using the #jQCon tag, but I wanted to collect some thought here in a slightly more robust way than I could using Twitter.  Here it goes:

• jQuery 1.3.3 looks really sick; John and the whole core team have done some fantastic work.  I really appreciate that these guys are really committed to making jQuery competitive in the running for "fastest" JS library.  A 3.5x speed increase overall in 1.3.3 is nothing to sneeze at.  I can't wait for the release!
• There are a lot more implications selectors being parsed right-to-left in jQuery than you might imagine.  As always, specificity plays a big role; but not necessarily in intuitive ways.  I'll probably write a more full post on this topic as my mind really got swirling around this one.
• People are totally stoked about jQueryUI and jQueryUI Labs.  That's a good thing as I see absolutely huge potential for jQueryUI and I've been developing some widgets that I plan to release on github relatively soon.
• The guys from JavascriptMVC are interesting characters.  And they get huge props for handling an attendee asking them to "fast forward" their presentation in a humorous way.
• ARIA is fantastic technology that people should really, really be looking into.  An interesting project would be to make all jQueryUI widgets ARIA-compliant.
• People who use and preach jQuery love Event Delegation.  I was in really good company with these guys and I was happy to see it getting so much press.  jQuery's $.live() handles delegation for you which is just slick.
• TestSwarm, as I anticipated, is going to rock. Javascript testing got a lot of press too and I'm really stoked that it did.  I was a little disappointed that there wasn't much coverage of testing frameworks (not even qunit)
• Steve Souders is even more passionate about front-end performance than I expected him to be.  Also, big ups for doing his presentation on less sleep than I had the night before.
• There's a lot of talk about how to organize your code with jQuery.  It seems that the fact that jQuery doesn't enforce some type of structure is both a blessing and a curse.  I've often said that for ATC, a big barrier has been that prototype's class functionality gives us something that we haven't been able to replace in jQuery.  The good news is that a lot of people are thinking about it and there are some great solutions out there.

I also have some thoughts about the social aspects of the conference

• The question I was asked most:  "how about the ratio?"  It had to be at least 25:1; but it could have been 30:1
• There's an iPhone version of the drinking game "Circle of Death" out there.  That made for every bit as much fun as you might imagine.
• After enough adult beverages, John Resig's "smooth-jazz" voice does lighten a bit.
• It was great to find so many people there who were truly social.  I was expecting to have a harder time getting people to open up--but there were others there that shared my mindset.
• Off the top of my head (and if you're not on the list, it's because I simply didn't think about it very long or we only talked briefly) it was great to meet and spend time with @bobholt, @jeresig, @voodootikigod, @rmurphey, @snookca, @bitofgrace, @bpartridge, @binary42, @Cowboy, @defunkt, @dainbrain
• I still wish I'd met even more.

Great time; more to come from me on the conference.  But that's an early round-up!

For those that weren't there, @bobholt set up a site to aggregate the slides.