Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (1:57:41 PM) 
A while back I got an email from Dave Chappell (the Sonic Software Dave, not the Chappell and Associates Dave) asking if I'd be interested in exploring an opportunity there coordinating standards and development work. I've been happy at Macromedia for quite a while, and had no plans to leave, but I know Dave, and it sounded like something that might be worth, you know, just talking about....
I decided to go talk to the Sonic guys, just to explore a little. Well, it turned out to be a number of really amazing conversations - I really liked the people, some of whom (like Dave and Jamie Merritt) I already knew and the rest of whom I immediately hit it off with, and the job sounded, well, great. I'd be in a position with one foot firmly in the standards world and one foot in a vibrant development organization. I'd get to do outward facing stuff, strategy stuff, and also write code. The products (especially now that Progress has acquired eXcelon) are in areas I've worked closely with at various times in my career. They already use Axis, and want to improve it further. I'd get to help grow the company into a bigger player in the connectivity/integration space. In short, it was pretty much a tailor-made position for me, and it was an offer too good to pass up.
Much of my career up until now has involved making things talk to each other. I really enjoy thinking about networking, from the mechanics of protocols to the fuzzy and fascinating boundary between the syntactical reality of messages in a medium and the semantics of what those messages mean to the humans on whose behalf they are sent. I've been doing some of this for Macromedia, but have been itching a little to get deeper into the communications tier, which doesn't *quite* make sense for Macromedia, which is essentially a presentation-tier company (maybe even *the* presentation-tier company). Sonic is dead-on into the integration space, and the various Web Service specs and technologies fall right in their critical path.
So... after five great years at Allaire/Macromedia, I'm going to be moving on. I'm pretty excited about the new opportunity, but of course I'm also sad to be leaving such an awesome team at Macromedia. I think Royale (do some searches on "royale macromedia" and you should find some info) is going to be a killer product, and I'll miss the joy of taking it all the way out the door, but I'm looking forward to watching what this extremely talented group produces. I think we're going to be redefining what a "good user experience" means in the next few years and I expect Royale will be a major topic in that conversation.
My last day at Macromedia will be September 18th, then I zoom into the Sonic offices for one day of work / orientation, and then I'm off to California on the 20th for the WSDL group meeting (what, another one? :)) the following week. Same meeting, same Glen, but with the Sonic hat instead of the Macromedia one. :) After the meeting I'm going to take a much-needed break before really ramping up at Sonic, so I'll be starting there full time in mid-to-late October.
Changes like this are both a little scary (leaving the known for the unknown, all that) and extremely energizing. I've been feeling a need to "reset" my life in a number of ways lately, and the new job dovetails perfectly with that. I'm *really* psyched for the month off in between, since I haven't had a long break in ages, and I hope to use the time to "reset" a whole bunch of non-work areas of my life - spend some quality time with friends and family, do some projects around the house, get myself back into a regular exercise regimen, hike around New England, etc... Then in October I'm equally psyched to revisit, in a new context, the wonderful problem space of getting everything to talk to everything else!
Hope your respective Labor Day Weekends have all been fabulous.
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