It is with unmingled delight that I am now able to announce my new gig. Starting on August 24th, I will be working for OmniTI.

I’ve been aware of OmniTI for almost as long as it has been in operation, because I have known Theo roughly that long, and have been attending his Scalable Internet Architectures presentation on and off for almost ten years. Every time I attend that talk, I think, well, this is cool stuff, but I’ll never work on anything that gets more than a few thousand visitors a day,

So I’ve been admiring OmniTI from afar for a long time, wishing that I could work for them, or, failing that, some place where my knowledge of scalability could be something more than a vague theory, never put into practice.

For reasons beyond the scope of this blog, however, I am unwilling to move out of the Lexington, Kentucky area. This life decision closes many opportunities to me, but it’s a choice that I continue to make willingly.

Anyways, some time in the middle of July, when Chris blogged about leaving OmniTI, I was poking around the website and saw that I might just be qualified for some of the positions they were offering, and, on a whim, emailed Theo to ask if they’d be willing to hire me, and let me stay home. Turns out, they were willing, and that’s what I’m going to do.

My offices just keep getting better over the last few years. 🙂

Exactly what I’ll be doing, I’m not yet entirely certain. But it will be a mixture of Perl and PHP, as well as being able to utilize my Apache HTTPD expertise more than I’ve ever done before, which is very exciting all by itself. I’ll be working with some of the smartest people I know, as well as a lot of smart people that I don’t yet know. And I’ll have the most fabulous office I could ask for, overlooking the swimming pool. My biggest concern is that I’ll have trouble staying focused, but I expect that I’ll develop strategies for that pretty quickly.

As to why I’ve waited so long to mention this – after all, I’ve known about it for close to two weeks – we had a deadline, of the crisis variety, at work. The deadline was Friday August 14th, and it was determined by various people that it would be unkind to the rest of the team to announce my departure while we were working so hard to meet that deadline. I’ve been brimming with excitement and a desire to tell the world, but saw the logic in the request.

It’s been a great year and a half at ClearMyRecord.com. I’m leaving the team in very capable hands, and wish them all much success. I had the privilege of working with a very talented team here, and would be glad to work with them again.

Oh, and I should also take this moment to thank Andy. Whether or not you’re looking for a job, if you’re in the IT business – and probably even if you’re not – you should read Andy’s website. His advice is sensible, practical, and indispensable.