Vivisecting Media

A Change in Focus

For the last 6 years I have been working full time at Macromedia (now Adobe) and three weeks ago I put in my resignation. As of last Tuesday I am now unemployed. Well, technically I am partner and CEO of Fake Science, but we are a new startup and few new companies are known for paying their employees.

The reason I made this choice was to really focus on making Fake Science the best company that it can be. Trying to juggle two full time jobs was getting a little much. This is a massive change for me and I am excited and scared shitless at the same time. I feel that this is normal, or at least I have been told this is normal and if I wasn’t a little nervous something would be wrong. This will be the first time since leaving college (I decided to change majors, some people call it “dropping out”) that I will not be working a 9-5 job, and that is a pretty long time ago.

I haven’t mentioned my affiliation to Macromedia in the past posts because I wanted to keep my day job and side company separate, but now that I am done I feel I can mention what I did there and how it will effect what technologies we use with the Fake Science site.

For the last 3 years I have been working on the Flex Builder team as a Senior QA Engineer and team lead. If you haven’t heard of Flex or Flex Builder check out the new public beta. I may be a little spoiled and an inside man but seriously Flex is the hottest thing I have seen and worked with in a long time, and it has drastically changed how I develop Flash applications. You can check it out at labs.macromedia.com. Before I was on the Flex Team I worked in the Technical Support department. During my 3 year stint there I have supported almost every product Macromedia made over the years (minus a few server products and such).

It’s been a long run, and the people I worked with at Macromedia are amazing. In fact I was tempted to leave about a year ago, but I enjoyed working on the team so much I decided to stick it out for another year.

Well, that time is over now and I am on my own. The next two months will be on the chiller side to kind of detoxify from working 18 hours a day 7 days a week on two projects. I want to take some time to refocus and look ahead at what we will be doing with FS. Once we get into April we will start back into some serious dev work and expect to see some amazing new features and functionality on the site.

In the meantime we will still be adding things here or there, fleshing out the catalog (we are averaging 4-5 releases a week right now and gaining steam), continuing to post here and the Scientist and I will be heading to SXSW and the Winter Music Conference. If any of you are going to these conferences let me know. A’ight, back to “work”…