Bye Yahoo!

Today was my last day at Yahoo. I’ve had a terrific time working there with all the incredible people and projects over the past couple of years. It was tough for me to leave, but I’ve decided it’s best for me to go on to “pursue other opportunities”. A special thanks goes out to Bradley Horowitz who was kind enough to mentor me while I was there and to Caterina Fake, Chad Dickerson and Raymie Stata who were mentoring me implicitly through their actions. Also, I’d like to thank Pasha Sadri for inventing Yahoo Pipes and I wish him the best of luck with his new company!

There are far too many people that I owe thanks to at Yahoo, and I hope we will cross paths again in the future. You all are the company’s greatest asset.

One of the many things Bradley taught me about working for large companies is to try to leave everyday knowing that you did all you could to make the place better. It’s an ambitious standard to live by and I hope my time at Yahoo improved the company.

My neighbor Scott’s on Valleywag

So I just found Scott Gatz’s blog via Valleywag which is served to me via Google Reader. While that in itself is not unusual, it is kinda funny to me because Scott sits on the other side of a cube wall from me. We work in the same department but on different teams.

Scott isn’t the loudest guy at work, and I like that he’s not afraid to share interesting observations on his blog. It gives me a whole new perspective on the guy. I on the other hand am very loud, yet I tend to write nothing of substance on my blog.

As it turns out, I’m one of those yahoos he describes here that does read Valleywag daily. My personal hobby is identifying the sources of leaked information from the mother ship.

My current favorite Pipe

Created by one of our users, this Pipe creates a feed of your Flickr Contacts’ favorite photos. (Here, I’m viewing the output in Google Reader)
He’s posted it here in the Flickr Hacks Group. This is an excellent Pipe to look at for advanced users combining Split, For Each, Regex and Sub Pipes to create the end result. He also makes great use of the Prompt fields in the user inputs of the Sub Pipes to create a readable interface in the primary Pipe.

Looking for Summer Interns for Pipes

We are looking for some good students to work on Pipes for the summer. Semantic web, Ajax, Canvas tag, Data Mashups, Visual Programming: You already know if this is the thing for you. Yahoo is a really fun place to work and Silicon Valley is a terrific place to spend the summer. My first experience with California came when I worked as an intern at Sony and I decided this was where I wanted to live. Get in touch with me if you are interested. ( mr dot donut at yahoo.com )

See you in Austin

I’m off to SXSW tomorrow. Hope to see you there. If you are interested in working on Pipes, drop me a line or find me at the conference.