What happened?

As some of you may have heard, today I resigned from my position at Rearden Commerce. Leaving a company is never a fun thing, because you know how you feel when you hear that someone else is leaving.. and you can see it in people’s eyes. I have reminded myself multiple times today that I am still going to be 30 mins away, most of my communication with those people has been via email and IM and there is no reason for me not to stay in touch.

Why did I resign?

That’s a very good question. Let me preface this by saying that I really don’t have anything about Rearden that I can point at and say ‘this thing’ is why I left. Rearden is a great company, they were professional through out my entire experience there. They employ many very talented and driven engineers, and they have a great product. My gut feeling after spending some time there, is that they will do very well. The management team is very skilled and they know their market and niche extremely well. Every day I went to work I heard about a new major deal or a small company Rearden had acquired to contribute to their march toward owning the ‘Personal Assistant’ space.

When I first arrived there I struggled with two things, and ultimately wound up being my demise as an employee. I have an extreme passion for Open Source, being part of that community, and giving my time to contribute. So you are probably thinking, ‘Why didn’t I just do that on the side?’ — well the answer is that I did do it on the side and the results were slow and my sleep schedule paid the price. Rearden has a very business/enterprise specific niche at the moment, and building and deploying new features to those customers is a priority (as it should be), but I couldn’t stop my Open Source envy. 

Secondly, a overwhelming majority of their user base is using IE6. As a web developer — the last thing I do when building anything in client side JavaScript is to test it in IE6. I basically hold my nose, load the page and pray that things ‘mostly work’. Now I’m not going to claim that I can ever get away from doing this, but building really cutting edge features based on new technology becomes significantly less probable when you are catering to this crowd. I know that Rearden has some really cool future plans, and is publicly talking about bringing the application to the consumer market — but I’m impatient and I just simply didn’t want to wait.

What’s Next?

I am going to jump right into a gig with Slide Inc. as a Web Developer. However, before I get to any Web Development tasks I am going to be addressing a pretty serious need they have in their QA department. Slide currently has many applications that are used directly on their site, slide.com and on social networks (primarily facebook.com and myspace.com) and right now they have essentially no functional automation.

At OSAF I saw what a major difference automated testing can make, and the reason I am so excited about this is because I was a QA Engineer at one point manually testing a pretty complex web application (Cosmo) and I have seen how much a difference test automation can make in the release cycle, the development cycle, QA test cycles and simply the daily lives of your poor QA teams.

How am I going to accomplish this task you might ask? Thats the best part — I have fixed about 10 bugs in Windmill in the last week, and will be putting whatever effort is required into getting Windmill to a state where we can functionally automate all of Slides application testing. This looks to be a serious win for Slide, and a serious win for Windmill. 

At some point in the future, when I feel that this project is to the point where it can be maintained and built on by the Slide QA teams I will move on to Web Development tasks. At that point a smaller amount of time will still be allocated to maintaining Windmill, adding new features that Slide and the community need and working towards the next evolution of Windmill. That is quite a ways off in the future, so I will address all that when the time comes.

The rest of my ‘free’ development time, will be consumed by a project that I am involved in with the Mozilla Corporation. This project lives in the QA realm as well, and could probably be classified as a distant cousin to Windmill. More details about that will be announced the week of OSCON, so keep your eyes pealed.

Change can be extremely tough, but it is also very exciting. I want to thank all of my former peers at Rearden for a good experience, and I wish them all the absolute best.