For those that don't know, I have spent the past 2 1/2 years working for Shutterfly, the leading online photo service. My time at Shutterfly has been filled with incredible highs and some frustrating times as well. I learned an amazing amount about consumer focused online services. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
Shutterfly is powered by an amazing group of extremely dedicated people. I have never worked for a company that had so many people that were so dedicated to a company's future and even more intensely to its customers. Shutterfly is in a very competitive space (the online photo finishing space has tons of companies competing and more are added each week) and the company is growing rapidly.
However, there comes a time when you have to move on. That time has come for me. Starting next week, I am going to do something very different. I am joining the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) as a Development Manager. While there will be some parts of this new position which will be similar to my Shutterfly position, there are also many areas where I will be learning new things. I am very excited about the opportunity and look forward to meeting new people and building new experiences.
For those that don't know OSAF is building open source applications. The goal is to provide users with high quality open source applications that solve real world problems. OSAF's first application is a calendaring solution. Chandler is a cross-platform Desktop client that will talk to a calendaring/sharing server (Cosmo) to store and share calendaring data with other users. Cosmo is a reference implementation of CalDAV, the IETF standard for sharing calendar events, built on top of the WebDAV standard. (For those that don't know, Cosmo is the server that stores data for FoxMarks, the bookmark syncing service for Firefox!). OSAF also has another very interesting project underway called Scooby that is building a Web-based client for accessing your calendar data.
I will be working on Cosmo and Scooby, OSAF's two server side projects. Scooby will utilize Web 2.0 technologies and is using Ajax technologies as a big part of its implementation. I suspect that my coding efforts in the short term will focus on contributing to Scooby and the WebUI pieces of Cosmo (Adminstrator Console).
I am really looking forward to working with the team at OSAF on these projects. I think they are important to the community and have a great deal of potential.
Wish me luck. Another great life adventure begins!
