I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining Half Off Depot, LLC as Lead Software Architect on June 27th. Half Off Depot is a growing, promising startup here in Atlanta. As you might gather from the name, they’re in the daily deals space, sort of along the lines of Groupon and LivingSocial. As of this writing, they have been focusing on the Atlanta, Georgia and Knoxville, Tennessee markets.
I’ll be focusing on a number of areas, both server-side and in the mobile app arena, in addition to helping build the technology team.
This was not an simple decision. I’ve been in a Senior Software Development Engineer role at Yahoo! since April 2010. During the first decade of my career, I spent over four years at both Community Connect Inc. (now Interactive One) and Schematic, Inc. (now Possible Worldwide), both in senior-level roles. It’s not my style to leave a position after just over a year; I’m much more of a long-term kind of guy. However, as I got deeper into Schematic, I took on much more technical leadership where I was leading projects and directly managing developers, but haven’t done a lot of that at Yahoo! yet. I’ll be able to tap back into that wider range of my skills at Half Off Depot.
My transition to Yahoo! was really about focusing on my passion: architecture and development. Yahoo! has afforded me some incredible opportunities, especially when it came to exposing me to more technologies outside of the PHP and open source tools I’ve worked with over the past decade.
Specifically, I’ve spent a lot of time with Objective-C, Apple frameworks such as UIKit and AppKit, Hadoop, some Microsoft Mediaroom, and even client-side technologies. Yahoo! has really helped me expand my skill set and grow as a developer. I’ve worked with some incredibly talented, experienced developers. It’s been an amazing ride. I’m going to miss it!
But, startup life came calling, and it was time to answer. I could not be more excited to join the Half Off Depot team, and I wish my Yahoo! colleagues the best of luck. If you ever get the chance to work at Yahoo!, take it!
This is going to be an incredible journey – I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned! You’ll be hearing more from me in the weeks and months ahead, especially as I begin to focus more on PHP, the web, and native mobile application development.
