
(originally uploaded by
evhead)
As some of you may have already seen,
Ev just announced that he's
moving on. Ya know it's funny — I've been reading
EvHead (his blog) for ~5 years, when
he and the Pyra gang first
released Blogger. I was a nerdy
college kid at the time, who read every issue of
Wired I could get my hands on and dreamed about living and working in Silicon Valley some day. Then hipsters like Ev and
Meg and
Matt and
PB started blogging, and I started reading them. Religiously. I mean, they were the people
doing the innovating on the web, and were actually
talking about it as they were doing it!
Fast forward a few years to February, 2003 when Ev
announced that Google had acquired Blogger. I was sitting in an Internet café in Bangkok catching up on tech news, freshly back from a
month in Burma and a week at the Vipassana Center in
northern Thailand. The news was a
huge shock, and as soon as I got home I wrote
KatieB (who'd been working at Google for a while already) about open positions on the Blogger team. The stars must have been in alignment or something, because I
started a few weeks later.
I felt like a nervous groupie the day I started. "OMG, I'm gonna meet Ev! I hope he doesn't fire me when finds out I
jumped ship to MT the day it was released..." (I finally came
back to the fold in 5/2004). He turned out to be a totally cool, down-to-earth, funny guy — an exciting person to just
be around. It's difficult to describe how incredibly fortunate I feel to have gotten to work with him over the past year and a half. He's always been receptive, encouraging and helpful with
whatever I've been working on.
While I'll definitely miss his presence around
the office, I'm truly excited for him. He's finally gonna have time to do some traveling, which he's soooo gonna dig. And read, and think, and plan his next great adventure with all the wisdom and insight from the past six years of hard work.
Cheers
Ev — thanks for everything!
More folks: Biz,
CW,
Danah,
Matt Haughey,
Ovidiu Predescu,
Sarah Hatter,
Shellen,
SteveJ,
Sutter,
Tony Pierce |
Metafilter,
Technorati