Going to work for SitePen!

I’m excited to announce that starting November 5th, I’ll be working for SitePen. Never heard of SitePen? That’s not surprising. But, if you’re involved in web development, you’ve likely heard of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit. Alex Russell, Director of R&D at SitePen, is the leader of the Dojo Core project and SitePen’s CEO, Dylan Schiemann is also a JavaScript fiend who has been involved with Dojo for a long time.

I responded to Alex’s blog posting for a “Sweet Gig”, which is indeed a very cool and unusual opportunity. I met with Dylan and Alex out in Santa Clara just before AjaxWorld, which I unfortunately couldn’t attend. A couple days after our meeting, Dylan offered me a position that, for me, is even cooler than the R&D sweet gig.

People who know me or have read my blog for some length of time know that I’m a “product guy”. If you look at SitePen’s website, you’ll see that SitePen is a web consulting business. I’ve done that kind of work in the past, and while there are plusses to that kind of business, it’s not what I like to do.

Dylan has opened up a slot for me doing a combination of “product promotion/product development/R&D”. My job title for the moment is “product manager”, because that’s the closest fit to what I’ll be doing, but the position is really a lot more open and cool than that. Basically, I’m going to work with Dylan, Alex and the others at SitePen to build neat products and scalable services.

With its ties to Dojo, SitePen is obviously a very open source friendly environment, and they’re very committed to the open web. I think there’s a terrific opportunity to build new products and services within this environment.

So, what will these new products and services be? Great question. I’ll let you know once I figure that out 😉

Greetings to my new colleagues at SitePen, and a “fare thee well” to my friends at Arbor Networks.