Moving to Portland

Neither Elisabeth nor I have fully adjusted to the way of life in San Francisco (we currently live in SoMa, right next to downtown). I’m sure we could find something quieter in other parts of the bay area, but for us it’s still not the same. I’ve found that I click much better with the Portland Tech scene personality-wise, and it’s really hard to beat the beautiful scenery of the Pacific northwest, so we’ll be moving to Portland at the end of next month. We have many new and old friends in the Portland area, and are terribly excited to reconnect with a few in particular and get grounded in a good church home. While I fully expect for my work to remain relatively fast paced, we’re just looking to slow down some of the other aspects of our life.

New Work

I am also in the process of looking for new work, starting immediately. As you can read in the official announcement, Vidoop was forced to layoff a considerable portion of the staff, myself included. Times are tough right now, and they’re doing what they need to do in order for the company to weather this current economic storm. Vidoop really was a dream job for me, in every sense of the term, and I will miss working alongside a bunch of really talented developers. Hopefully our move to Portland will mean I’ll have the chance to work with some of them again in the future.

At this point, I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up after this. Ideally, I’d like to stay in the identity space, continuing to work on technologies like SAML, OpenID, OAuth, XRD, etc. That’s where both my interest and experience lie, and where I’d be most effective… I still have a lot I’d like to offer to that space. I do have a couple of opportunities I’m pursuing right now, but I’m also curious to see what else might be out there. I’ve posted an updated resume in case any one out there has my next dream job waiting for me, either on a full-time or contract basis.

And if you’ve got opportunities for some other awesome Portland-based developers, let me know. I know their expertise includes PHP, Python, Django, jQuery, C/C++/C#, PostreSQL and probably a bunch of other languages and technologies. We’ve setup an internal mailing list so if you’ve got a position or two open, please let me know and I’ll pass them along.