Crossing the pond
I borrowed the title from a guy who kickstarted all of this. Thanks Ariya ;)
I’m leaving Betfair. I owe a lot to this company: for a bit longer than a year I have had the pleasure to work with smart, enlightened, knowledgeable people from which I learned loads. Leaving was definitely not an easy choice.
The only thing didn’t happen, is that I didn’t become a proper punter: I just learned that even something sounding “boring” as betting on sports, can actually be a very big challenge in terms of the technologies involved. Even more, if you try to do it in the Betfair way: with million of customers, all constantly hammering the servers to make the most out of their money.
Where am I going?
On January I’ll be joining Neustar, working with the Webmetrics team, based in San Diego.
Google searches about San Diego return only this kind of picture ;)
Webmetrics works in the business of Monitoring and Testing websites. It’s a big player in this market and I’m going to help on scaling their infrastructure to use the light-and-awesome PhantomJS.
Also, I’ll try to add my bit to the already remarkable amount of work they share with the Open Source community: people like Patrick Lightbody, creator of Selenium RC, works there!
I’ll be reporting to Simon Nicoud: folks that navigate the Web Velocity waters must remember him for his talks at Velocity Conf.
I’m not exactly moving to the USA
Love is a very important thing in Life, especially if you have found it. In the name of it, I decided to try to marry love-need with work-aspiration: I’ll still be based in UK, but travel on a regular basis to USA. This will require me to become a very frequent flyer, and learn all the tricks of jet lag management.
I’m very excited about this: working in the USA, with USA folks is something I always wanted to experience. And now I finally can. Plus, I’ll be working on technologies I’m really into: what better can I ask for?
Plus, San Diego seems like a REALLY nice place to be. So, I’m not going to miss the english weather. Right? ;)
See you downtown!