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.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I started a new job at Vidoop a month or so ago which will have Elisabeth and I moving to San Francisco. We were both up there a couple of weeks ago and were able to find an absolutely perfect apartment. It took a little bit to convince the landlord that we really were planning to be in San Francisco for the long term, but it was well worth the extra trouble. The place we found is right in the heart of SOMA, about four buildings down from Chris who I’ll be working with at Vidoop. It’s a beautiful three story loft, hardwood floors throughout, 2 bedroom, 2 and half bath, washer and dryer in the unit, parking space included (which would otherwise cost upwards of $300 a month), 20 foot ceiling in the living room with windows all the way to the top (lots of natural light)… all in all about 1500 square feet. Like I said, it’s really perfect for us. The one major downside is that the kitchen is rather small, especially compared to what Elisabeth has been used to all her life, but we’ll manage.

We’ve also just about finished our post-wedding shopping for furniture and kitchen stuff to outfit our new home. We did our “registry completion” at Linens ‘N Things, where they let you buy everything left on your registry at 20% off. So we bought everything they had (including Elisabeth’s KitchenAid Mixer which will be the centerpiece of our kitchen) and a few additional things we saw. Somehow I think we got 20% off the things that weren’t on our registry as well, but oh well. We also made an “impulse buy” at World Market when we saw that we could get their entire Tao Collection of furniture for 60% off. We bought every piece they had with the exception of one table that we didn’t really know where to put, so we’re now good on furniture for the entire living room and office. We still need a bedroom suite, but that’s just gonna have to wait for the time being. We will be setting up the second bedroom as a guest room, so once we get settled I fully expect people to come over and visit. :-)

Pretty much everything is packed up and ready to move here. The moving company comes to load everything up on Monday, July 7th and plans to deliver it to the new place sometime between the 9th and the 14th. It depends on what other loads they can fit onto the same truck, but we should have a more definite delivery date in a few days. In the meantime I’m working wherever I can find high speed internet access, and we’re saying our goodbyes to local family and friends. Two weeks from now we’ll be in San Francisco setting up the new place. (Anyone in SOMA want to come and help assemble a LOT of furniture?)

I’ve been working in the Identity Management space for a few years now. I started getting involved with the Shibboleth project while at the University of Memphis. After a year and a half, I moved to California and took a job at USC working in their middleware group. I’ve spent the last two years there helping to develop and manage various parts of the Identity Management cloud including the LDAP directories, meta-directory processes, and their Shibboleth environment. In October 2006 I formally joined the core Shibboleth development team, focusing on the Shibboleth 2.0 Identity Provider.

Meanwhile, I have also been toying with OpenID for a couple of years. In early 2007 or so, I sort of took over development of Alan Castonguay’s OpenID plugin for WordPress. I started with a couple of new features, then worked to add support for the latest OpenID protocol, lots of code refactoring, etc. I got to know characters like Chris Messina, Scott Kveton, and a host of others. I continued making updates to the WordPress plugin as I had time, but it never felt like enough. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly enjoyed the work I was doing at USC and with Shibboleth… I just would have liked to have had more time for everything else as well. Every now and then Chris or Scott would prod me about going to work at Google or somewhere to spend more time on OpenID and related technologies, but I wasn’t ready to leave my work at USC.

Late last year, Chris Messina and Steve Ivy announced the DiSo Project, initially based on my updated wp-openid plugin. Within the first week after it was announced, I sat down with Chris and Steve and we decided it would be best to officially move the wp-openid plugin under the DiSo umbrella to allow for tighter integration with the other planned work. Then a lot happened this last February in the social networking space — Google announced the Social Graph API and SGFoo really got people talking more about enriching the OpenID endpoint (among other things). Things were beginning to move pretty fast, and I felt like if I didn’t jump in now then I’d end up watching all the great new developments from the sidelines. I spent the next few months interviewing with a number of companies active in this space and made a couple of trips to San Francisco to talk with them in person.

In the end, a dinner conversation with Luke Sontag had me sold. I was quite familiar with Vidoop and their OpenID provider, knew they had a great development team, but had always been a little skeptical of the company. After Luke gave me a better picture of their overall vision and where technologies like DiSo fit into that picture, I knew that these guys really “get it”. They understand the importance of what DiSo is trying to do, and more importantly they are willing to do their part in making it a reality. I love Vidoop’s OpenID implementation and have been using it since before I took this job, but that’s not why I did. I took the job because the team at Vidoop know their shit, they know the kinds of problems we’re up against, and they are ready to take a shot at developing some real solutions. Well that and I really can’t wait to get started working with Chris a lot more. :)