Becoming Common

In a recent post I alluded to changes that were coming soon. I say recent because it still shows up on the front page of my blog, not because it was really that recent. Geesh, almost a month. Anyway, now that the contract is signed and the important people know, I can finally talk about those changes.

Today I quit my job. Not effective today, but today I announced that after a 3 and a half year run, I’m going to be leaving Canterbury this summer. The reason is that as of July 1, I’ll be starting as a Software Engineer for the Creative Commons . I can’t begin to describe how excited I am about this position. Working for CC during the past 6 months on projects like ccValidator , mozCC , and most recently ccTag has been incredibly rewarding. The opportunity to do software development for a socially progressive not-for-profit is one that I just can’t pass up.

Canterbury has been very good to me, so it’s not without some bittersweet feelings that I made this decision. At Canterbury I’ve been paid to learn about Python and Zope , as well as paid to write about my experiences doing so. I’ve been challenged and supported professionally and personally, so I’ll definitly look back on my time here fondly. However, when Mike offered me the CC position, I realized that I’m not an educator, and I am a hacker; I think CC is a place where I can grow in that respect. I’m also very excited to be working with people who aren’t hackers. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the classes I enjoy the most at college are not computer science, but political science, english, and visual communication. So the opportunity to mix my love of hacking with a group of non-hackers (or at least non-CS majors) is also very exciting to me.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more about CC topics here in the near future. In the meantime, support me in my new job by trying out the latest builds of the GUI version of ccTag, and let me know what you think.