Some news: I’m super happy to report that I started a new job last week at The
New York Times.
After ten years at iovation, the last four working remotely from New York City
and the last three under the ownership of TransUnion, I felt it was time to
find something new. At The Times, I’ve taken the role of Staff Engineer on a new
team, User Systems. I’m particularly stoked for this gig, as it falls right into
areas of abiding interest, including privacy-by design, personal data
protection, encryption, authentication, credential management, and scaling a
vital app for the whole business. Add that to the straightforward commute once
the office reopens, and it’s hard to find something more ideal.
I truly appreciate the extraordinary experience of my ten years at iovation. I
originally thought I’d stay a couple years, but was so engaged by the people and
the great work we did that I kept at it. I learned a ton about product
engineering, product design, and scalable architectures, but especially about
working with terrific colleagues who made me a better person even as I tried to
be of service to them. I will especially miss working with Scott, Kurk, Clara,
Travis, John, and Eric — and countless others. I wish them all the best, and
would enjoy working with any and all of them again anytime.
Now I’m excited to make new connections working with my amazing new colleagues
at The Times. I expect we’ll collaborate on fulfilling work building super
useful tools that advance The Times mission to inform and empower its readers.
I’m delighted to be jumping on this ride with them.
Since June, as part of my work for PGX, I’ve been doing on-site full-time
consulting for iovation here in Portland. iovation is in the business of
deterring online fraud via device identification and reputation. Given the
nature of that business, a whole lot of data arrives every day, and I’ve been
developing PostgreSQL-based solutions to help get a handle on it. The work has
been truly engaging, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. And there are some really
great, very smart people at iovation, whom I very much like and respect.
So much so, in fact, that I decided to accept their offer of a full time
position as “Senior Data Architect.” I started on Monday.
I know, crazy, right? They’ve actually been talking me up about it for a long
time. In our initial contact close to two years ago, as I sought to land them as
a PGX client, they told me they wanted to hire someone, and was I interested. I
said “no.” I said “no” through four months of contracting this summer and fall,
until one day last month I said to myself, “wait, why don’t I want this job?”
I had been on automatic, habitually insisting I wasn’t interested in a W2
position. And with good reason. Aside from 15 months as CTO at values of n
(during which time I worked relatively independently anyway), I’ve been an
independent consultant since I founded Kineticode in November of 2001. Yeah.
Ten Years.
Don’t get me wrong, those ten years have been great! Not only have I been able
to support myself doing the things I love—and learned a ton in the process—but
I’ve managed to write a lotofgreatcode. Hell, I will be
continuing as an associate with PGX, though with greatly reduced
responsibilities. And someday I may go indy again. But in the meantime, the
challenges, opportunities, and culture at iovation are just too good to pass up.
I’m loving the work I’m doing there, and expect to learn a lot over the next few
years.
So what, you might ask, does this mean for Kineticode, the company I founded to
offer support, consulting, and training services for Bricolage CMS? The truth
is that Kineticode has only a few technical support customers left; virtually
all of my work for the last two years has been through PGX. So I’ve decided to
shut Kineticode down. I’m shifting the Bricolage tech support offerings over to
PGX and having Kineticode’s customers move there as their contacts come up for
renewal. They can expect the same great service as always. Better even, as there
are 10 associates in PGX, and, lately, only me at Kineticode. Since Kineticode
itself is losing its Raison d’être, it’s going away.
I intend to remain involved in the various open-source projects I work on. I
still function as the benevolent dictator of Bricolage CMS, though other folks
have stepped up their involvement quite a lot in the last few years. And I
expect to keep improving [PGXN] and DesignScene as time allows (I’ve actually
been putting some effort into both in the last few weeks; watch for PGXN
and Lunar/Theory announcements in the coming weeks and months!). And, in fact,
I expect that a fair amount of the work I do at iovation will lead to blog
posts, conference presentations, and more open-source code.
This is going to be a blast. Interested in a front-row seat? Follow me on
Twitter.
I recently got back in touch with a friend from college via Facebook. She asked
me, “So David give me the 411? Whats been up with you for oh? 15 years?”
Facebook’s Wall doesn’t seem to care much for multi-paragraph posts, but it kind
of makes sense to post it in my blog anyway.
Julie and I moved to Florida in January, 1994 for a few months, and to Virginia
the following summer. I started in the graduate program in the UVa Department of
Anthropology in the fall. I also got on the internet that year and started
learning how to program. We got married in May, 1995, in Orange, Virginia.
Two years later, I got my MA. Even though I was at UVa doing Near Eastern
archaeology, by masters paper was based on research in the American Southwest.
That’s just the way things shook out. The paper was later rejected by an
archaeology journal. The peer reviews were really offensive, one in particular;
some of the old guard of Southwest archaeology were really threatened by it.
Didn’t help that I’d dropped the research part of the article before submitting.
I was advised to do so, but it was clearly a mistake. C’et la vie. I mostly
found it humorous and typical that academics could be such dicks to a student
submitting his first peer-reviewed paper.
I have a PDF of the paper I keep meaning to blog. I should do that one of these
days.
I spent a summer on Cyprus excavating a medieval site and the summer of 98 with
my advisor for four weeks in southeastern Turkey. Kurdistan, really. My focus
was supposedly architecture and urbanization, but in truth I enjoyed creating a
database app for the project much more than counting pottery sherds. I went into
the Turkey trip thinking it would determine whether or not I stuck to
archaeology. I’d by this time had a full-time job for about a year doing systems
and integration programming for the UVa medical center. It was fun, engaging
work, and although I enjoyed the academic side of graduate schools (seminars and
such), the culture of academia held no interest for me at all.
So I quit the program when I got back from Turkey. In 1999 we moved back to SF.
I worked for UCSF for 9 months, then went to work for Salon.com. I was there a
year, then went on my own, working on an open-source content management system
called Bricolage that I’d developed with my colleagues at Salon. Life was
great for us in SF. We moved into a loft in 2002 and really made the best of our
time in The City.
In 2003 we were visiting Portland for a weekend just after Christmas and decided
to have a real estate agent show us some properties to get a feel for the place.
We’d been thinking about moving to Portland since ’96, and were still thinking
maybe we’d do it in a couple more years. Julie’s dad had moved to Eugene, 2
hours down the road, so that was also a factor. To our surprise, we found a
house we fell in love with. So we bought it, sold the loft, and moved to
Portland, arriving in April, 2004. Our daughter, Anna, was born in May 2005.
And the rest is history. I’ve done a bunch of technology-related work over the
last 10 years, mostly Perl and PostgreSQL programming. These days, I do
PostgreSQL consulting as an associate in PostgreSQL Experts, some Bricolage
consulting via my company, Kineticode, and have recently started a new venture
with a friend to develop iPad app.
Portland is a terrific place to live. We love it here. Not gritty like SF,
but still with the elements of urban living. We have a house close to downtown
and I get around mainly by bike. Anna is doing great; she’s so awesome. She’s in
a Montessori school that we’ll likely keep her in through 8th grade.
Julie is doing well, too. At UVa she became Art Director for the University’s
Capital Campaign, and started a business, Strongrrl, while in San Francisco,
mainly focused on graphic design for universities and non-profits. Business has
slowed in the last few years, alas, as print has been dying and budgets have
become restricted. She still does a bit of work, but also has started sewing and
an Etsy store (kind of empty at the moment, will be stocked in the next
couple of weeks) and this year doing deep genealogical research. We both work at
home, but she does the lion’s share of the domestic and child-rearing duties.
After 18 years together our relationship has deepened tremendously. We’re very
happy together.
Anyway, life is good. I suppose if I were to write this again tomorrow I’d focus
on a bunch of other things. A lot happens in 17 years, as you no doubt know.
This is just a thin slice, with more academic stuff than I usually go into, but
the context seemed to warrant it.
A bit of good news: In addition to my ongoing Kineticode work doing Bricolage
consulting services, training, and support, I have a new gig! I, along with
Josh Berkus, David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan, and a team of other
PostgreSQL experts, have started a new company: PostgreSQL Experts, Inc. I’m
really excited about PGX, a cooperative of solid and experienced–dare I say
expert?–people dedicated to providing exceptional PostgreSQL professional
services, including consulting, training, and support.
Moreover, we have a solid group of experienced application developers, who are
ready and willing to build your PostgreSQL-backed applications on Rails,
Catalyst, PHP, or whatever environment you prefer. If it’s related to
PostgreSQL, it’s what we do.
So get in touch or meet us at PGCon (we’re sponsoring!) or at OSCON
2009. I’m really excited about our company, and looking forward to growing it
as PostgreSQL adoption grows.
Yes indeed, I am back. Was I ever gone? Well, yes, I’ve been rather busy for the
last 15 months.
But December 31 was my last day at Values of n. I’m really pleased with the
work I did there. Sandy in particular, was a pleasure to work with. I really
think that the work that Rael and I did with Sandy has been important work. Dare
I say potentially paradigm-shifting? At any rate, I’m convinced that Sandy is
really going to go places. If you haven’t signed on to become her client, do
try. Though I will no longer be as intimate with her as I have in the past,
we’re still going to keep in touch—I’m still her client. And Rael will do a
great job pushing forward with her.
So why did I leave? Well, the truth is that, after Julie’s dad died in July, I
found that I no longer had the resources to commit to the 80-100 hours/week
required to work in a startup. It was just no longer that important to me. Don’t
get me wrong, it was rewarding work, but my priorities completely realigned. It
was vital that I continue helping Rael to get Sandy’s career launched, but once
that was done, it was time for me to move on.
And what am I doing now? Well, first and foremost, I’m taking a few months off.
I’m going to spend a lot more time re-acquainting myself with the two terrific
women with whom I share a house, and just generally reset myself. Take a few
deep breaths. Relax and enjoy life a bit. Sleep in now and then. That sort of
thing.
That’s not to say that I’ll be sitting on my ass all the time. I have a very
long list of things I want to do during this time, including catch up on my
blogging (hence the title of this post), fix some bugs in Bricolage and help get
2.0 out the door, update my Perl libraries (I’ve got some great ideas for
improving SVN::Notify), finally get all my digital photos organized, etc. I
already spent much of last week revamping our mail system (I outsourced it to
FuseMail). And all that’s leaving aside all the things Julie and I want to get
done around the house. That’s the really important stuff.
But do watch for more blog posts in the coming months, too. There are a few
interesting things I want to write about, and I’ve got some serious catching-up
to do. Interested in following along on my adventures? Follow me via Twitter.
The reason it has taken me so long to write this entry, after Adrian tagged me
back in February, is that I was waiting for a bit of news to become public so
that I could talk about it. Of course, I didn’t really have time to make it
public, so that took too long, too. But it finally happened, as you’ll see in
Number 5.
1. I Lived on a Kibbutz
From August 1988 until March 1989, I lived as a volunteer at Kibbutz Dafna in
Galilee Elian (upper Gallilee). This was one of the most memorable experiences
of my life, and I’ve actually been meaning to blog about it for a while now. I
arrived at the Kibbutz with only a few bucks in my pocket, but with a note
saying that I’d been accepted as a volunteer. I moved into a small room in
“Death Row” with another American who’s name I’ve long since forgotten.
Within a few weeks, I’d been selected by the barman, Johnny Howarth, to be his
co-barman (not what I was called, but that’s memory for you). We ran a small bar
just for the volunteers and interested Kibbutzniks in a small bomb shelter just
across the roads from Death Row. Yes, really. We served Goldstar beer very
cheaply (The kibbutz got it wholesale and we charged slightly more just to drink
for free ourselves) and really bad vodka and rum to the few who wanted it. Most
of the volunteers were English or Scandinavian, with a sprinkle of Americans and
other sorts thrown in (we also had 10 Thais living with us for several weeks),
and nearly all of us were 18-28 year-olds who liked to drink as much as possible
and get laid. I wasn’t quite the hero that Chad was in my brief time running
an establishment, but, ah, what a life!
About the same time I started tending bar, I also got a larger room that for all
but three months I had all to myself. For those three months, I shared it with
an Aussie, Andrew Jeffreys, with whom I became very good friends. He later
(1990ish) came and stayed with me at my Mom’s house in Sacramento for several
months.
I spent my time on the Kibbutz driving a tractor (only one volunteer got this
honor—most worked in the boot factory), mopping the dining room floor with the
giant electric mop, getting drunk, and dancing the night away every Friday night
at the Kibbutz disco (later named “Domino”). Great life for a 19 year-old taking
a year off from college. I was even “adopted” by a Kibbutz family, visiting with
their two young boys, who were very big on Michael Jordan (hi Esti!).
I finally came home in the Spring of 1989 after a short tour of Egypt and upon
hearing that my mom was very ill (she’s fine now, thanks). It was a good time to
go, anyway, because I rather felt that my brain was beginning to rot. There is
not a lot of intellectual stimulation in a Kibbutz environment. Still, it was an
amazing time for me.
2. I Used to be an Archaeologist
Before I was an über geek open-source and Web app hacker, I was an
Archaeologist. The summer before I went to Dafna, I worked for six weeks at Tel
Dor on the coast of Israel as a volunteer. I loved doing archaeology. So much
so that when I finally returned from Israel and sobered up enough, I went back
to school with a vengeance, earning my BA in Anthropology from the California
State University, Sacramento. In 1994, I started the graduate program at the
University of Virginia, intending to earn by Ph.D in anthropological
archaeology. I participated in excavations in Israel (three more seasons at Tel
Dor—I met my [now] wife, Julie, there in 1992), Cyprus, and southeastern
Turkey (Kurdistan, essentially).
I really enjoyed graduate school. Reading journals and writing essays really
appealed to me, and the vigor of the debate in a graduate seminar full of smart
people was absolutely invigorating. I finished my three years of course work,
picking up my MA after two, and continued auditing graduate seminars a fourth
year, just for the hell of it (I particularly enjoyed The Anthropology of
Science and the archaeological theory seminars).
But as I started casting about for a dissertation topic, I could find nothing
that really appealed to me. What I really enjoyed was debate and theory (hence
my nickname and the title of this blog), and counting bone fragments the size of
my toenail just didn’t do it for me. I was a theorist among a gang of
Michigan-trained empiricists. And I agreed with them that I needed to do
something “real” on which to build my career. But frankly, the problem was that
such things just did not interest me.
The summer following my fourth year, I accompanied my advisor, Pati Wattenmaker,
to Kazane Höyük, outside of Sanliurfa, in southeastern Turkey. At that time, I
already had a job for the University’s medical center doing integration
programming in Perl, and was getting my first experience with databases (Access
and SQL Server). Going into the project, I suspected that I was done with
archaeology, but the fact that, after we came in from the field each day (I have
always enjoyed the excavation part of archaeology), I found much more pleasure
in creating an Access database for the tracking of vast quantities of data than
I did in plowing through, categorizing, and entering in that data (read:
counting pottery sherds).
So in the fall of 1998, I left the program ABD, and in the summer of 1999, Julie
and I moved back to San Francisco.
3. Portland
Julie and I moved from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, in 2004. Of course
many of you already know that, but do you know why?
The reason is that we were looking for a change of lifestyle. We loved our
SoMa loft in San Francisco, but not the neighborhood so much. There are only so
many times we could tolerate coming home to find that someone had pissed on our
garage door. And don’t even get me started on hypodermic needles. Julie and I
wanted to start a family, and much as we loved our home and lifestyle in San
Francisco, we knew it wasn’t right for bringing up a child.
In truth, we had thought about Portland since 1996, when I was still in grad
school, and we even visited for a few days. When we visited again in December of
2003, we had a real estate agent show us some homes, just to get a feel for the
neighborhoods and what not, with the idea of maybe moving to Portland in a few
years. But she showed us a house that we fell in love with, we mad an offer, and
the rest is history.
Which leads me to…
4. Anna
Just a few months after our move to Portland, Julie got pregnant, and our
daughter, Anna was born on May 13, 2005. She’s nearly two now, and she’s the
light of our life. What a joy this kid is! She’s smart, has a great sense of
humor (yes, an 18-month-old can be funny!), and keeps us on our toes. I
couldn’t be happier; we lucked out and got a real gem of a daughter. We expect
to have fun with her for the rest of our lives.
5. Values of n
Here’s the big, recent change: I now spend my days as a Ruby hacker for Values
of n, working with my friend Rael Dornfest building Stikkit and, more
recently, i want sandy. Kineticode is still around, accepting only Bricolage
support contracts—no more consulting. I remain the maintainer for Bricolage, but
I’ve thrown down the gauntlet to get other people to step up an start to drive
the project more.
So, Ruby, eh? And Ruby on Rails? Yes. Rael chose to use these technologies
before I started working with him, and they were the right choices. And have I
found the Ruby religion? Well, no, not really. There are quite a number of
things I like better than in Perl, but none better than what will be in Perl 6
(someday, sigh). What I miss most from Perl are sane Unicode support,
fantastic regular expression support, and lists (yes, lists—as opposed to
arrays).
And what of Ruby on Rails, you ask? It seems like a fine Web application
development environment. The controllers and views are nice. But I’ll say no
more. You’ll have to buy me an awful lot of beer for that. I’ll take Goldstar.
As many of you know, Julie and I had our beautiful baby girl on May 13, 2005 at
10:10 am. She was 6 lbs 4 oz. (2800 g) and 19 inches (48.25 cm). Her name is
Anna Lily.
