I realized recently that I'm the record holder for longest reddit employment. It's incredible to think that, back when I started working at reddit five years ago, our monthly traffic totals were 38k uniques and 750k impressions (incredibly we now do more than that every hour), there was no commenting, and we were just beginning to undertake a drastic site rewrite from lisp into an exotic new language called python.
Though over the years we've had a fair share of bumps and outages, I daresay we are now thriving, and after a lot of thought I've decided to leave reddit (the job part anyway) on a high note. This community has accomplished so much in the last few months (to say nothing of the previous years) that I can't help to be humbled and proud to have been a part of it. I feel like my affinity for this community (and to some extent what I see on the site and what I just got to witness on the Mall in DC) is closer to patriotism than I would have believed possible in what is, on the surface and to an outsider, an exercise in Text with Strangers.
With the patriotic analogy in mind, I'm not sure if I should be saying "I'm moving on from my job at reddit" or "I hearby resign the office of a reddit employee effective immediately". Nah. Too formal. How about "I hearby pass the mop..."? ketralnis, raldi, jedberg, hueypriest, and Paradox aren't going anywhere, and we've made a lot of progress on the "additional engineers" front. We'll be putting up another round of job postings soon...and have some good news about the last round that will be coming soon in another blog post.
Either way, I love this community, and though I'm turning in my company keyboard, I'll be sticking around thank-you-very-much. To kill any conspiracy theories in the cradle, my parting with Conde Nast has been nothing but amicable. I have no doubt I'll be partaking in an odd job now and again on the site. As we've so oft been glad to point out when someone else asks for a feature, we're open source after all.
In an interesting coincidence, I got nominated to redditor of the day a little while back and finally got around to answering my questionnaire (not to say I'm finding my time to be any freer these days). Feel free to AMA here or there.
As for me, I'm going back to start-up life. I'm a sucker for an interesting problem, and I'll be back to working with spez at his new company hipmunk (I hope you'll pardon an old admin a plug on a new project. Here's the other side of the announcement.)
Glad to be working with you again, my friend!
