Today is my last day with Brightcove; a company which I joined just over a year ago.  My emotions are mixed about this life change; but like the change that brought me to Brightcove in the first place, I’m confident that I’ve made the right decision.  Once again, I didn’t set out to find a new job; yet one came and found me anyway. And once again, I didn’t plan to move across the country; yet we’re working on packing as we speak.

My grandfather passed away on the day I graduated from Georgia Tech; as I was approaching the end of school and beginning the interviewing process in earnest he asked me a question, “So where are you going to live when you graduate?” Knowing my grandfather as I did, I knew it was a trick question but I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Quickly, he answered for me, “The answer is always, ‘Wherever the job is.’” It’s a lesson I carry with me and that guided my decision to move from Atlanta to Boston to join Brightcove in the first place. And it’s a lesson still with me as we prepare to move less than a year later to California.

My father once told me that he’d become successful as much by his judgment of and willingness to embrace opportunities as hard work. He was a USAF pilot who got into the Air Force at the last possible moment (before he was too old to join) and got out and into the Airline industry at a time when they were hiring. He seized the opportunities that came his way and made the most of them. Once again, I’ve done the same.

I love Brightcove; I think this company is doing great things and will continue to do great things whether I am with them or not. I’ve been continually impressed by the talent of the engineering team, the dedication of the sales, account management, and customer service teams, and the constant belief that the company is a big part of the future of the Web. I really couldn’t agree more with that sentiment and I look forward to watching on from the outside as the company rises to new heights.

I get several emails a week through LinkedIn or other sources about “job opportunities.” I typically ignore or politely decline these messages as most of the are for companies that hold absolutely no interest for me or they’re not real offers; just recruiters looking for anyone who might be interested in anything. However, there are some companies whose name in my inbox would get me excited and when Netflix reached out to me to talk about joining their team, I knew it was worth chatting with them.  Aside from being a great company of which I’ve been a customer for many years, I had long known that my wife wasn’t thrilled with living in Boston and would jump at the opportunity to move to California. Several phone interviews, a 36-hour round-trip to Los Gatos, CA (which included a 3-hour flight delay, almost no sleep, and 5 hours of interviewing) and a weekend of recovery later, I’d accepted the job offer to join the Netflix team.

I’m really excited to join their “device platforms” group; the same group responsible for delivering the totally kick-ass implementation of Netflix for the Sony Ps3. I’m excited to work at a company that has completely embraced HTML5 and Javascript for delivering experiences across multiple platforms with multiple interface paradigms. I’m excited to be joining a team which, if my interview was any indication, is full of true, front-end engineering badasses. My wife and I are both excited about moving to sunny California!

At the same time, I’m sad to be leaving a family I was just beginning to develop in Boston. I’ve made some great friends along the way here and it sucks to have to leave so soon after it all began. I’m also sad not to be able to see Brightcove’s HTML5 players through to a state of real parity with the Flash players.  Ultimately, as is always the case, what I’ll miss most is the people.  I want to thank all of them for welcoming me so warmly to such a cold city and for the opportunity to do some amazing things with them!

So long, Brightcove; it’s been a pleasure!

Having just spent a whirlwind of a weekend in-and-around Boston for the jQuery Conference Boston 2010, I wanted to share as many thoughts as can as quickly as possible.  I was struck by how much different the tone of this year’s event was; and it was really refreshing to see.

Last year, and indeed in any jQuery-focused event, the tone has always been about people using jQuery to “do cool stuff (easily).” It’s really great; this reason is exactly why so many people gravitate to jQuery in the first place.  However, in his first-day keynote, John Resig hit us with an interesting statistic: jQuery is now used on nearly an third of all websites.  That figure, aside from being absolutely staggering, suggests that the message has been heard loud and clear already: You can use jQuery to make your life better as a developer!

So here we are in October 2010 and the trends of what people are doing with Javascript on the web are changing; the focus is clearly shifting to building what Adobe loves to term “Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)” in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. And I’m happy to say that the jQuery community, especially the wonderful group of speakers, really stepped up and understood that this year’s challenges were new to these developers raised on jQuery.

I think I really realized how different this year’s event was when Rebecca Murphey started talking about design patterns in her presentation. Mediators, Pub / Sub, the Observer pattern; these just aren’t topics that I’m accustomed to hearing about when talking to (most) Javascript developers.  I even think I heard mention of a factory (though, I admit, that thought terrifies me as the factory pattern immediately brings Java to mind with its AbstractDeckOfCardsFactoryFactory implementations).   Could it be that we’re close to inviting the Gang of Four to Javascript conferences? Well; maybe not. But Rebecca’s talk really crystalized the thought in my mind; Javascript, you’ve come a long way, baby!

It’s not that design patterns are new to Javascript; take for example the Prototype pattern which is an integral part of the language. Event bubbling can certainly be viewed as an implementation of the Chain of Responsibility pattern. But these concepts are likely very new to a great many Javascript developers. And, to be honest, why shouldn’t they be? For years, Javascript has been derided as nothing more than a toy language practiced primarily by designers with delusions that they were capable of “writing code.”

Instead of talking exclusively about fun effects (which Karl Swedberg did, wonderfully, by the way) we had talks on code structure and best practices. Garann Means talked about how utilizing template techniques helped her team reduce 12,000 lines of code to 4,000.  Thomas Reynolds talked about structuring multi-thousand-line applications using MVC. And there were multiple talks on testing including conversation of TDD, and systematic integration testing! These aren’t “form validation” and “pop up a modal” examples; these are real applications built in javascript and it’s quite exciting to see our community embracing the future.

I’ve got more to say, and a ton more thoughts on the conference. For now, if what I saw this weekend at #jqcon was any indication of the way not only the jQuery community is going, but the JS community in general, the future looks pretty damn bright!