Category Archives: Yahoo!

Moving on…

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Today, after 3½ years at Yahoo! – the longest I have ever held a single job – I officially handed a resignation letter to my manager.

I’m not going to rant about what’s wrong with Yahoo! – no company is perfect, and mostly I feel incredibly grateful to have had the chance to work there. I got to build things that are seen, used, and hopefully enjoyed every day by a mind-numbing amount of users. That has been a very humbling experience.

For anyone who speaks HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and wants to learn about scalable web development, Yahoo! is probably one of the best places to do so. There is a great company culture in place, cutting edge technologies being worked on (YQL, YUI, Hadoop…), and while the food isn’t free, it really isn’t bad. And you do get free coffee, smart colleagues, massive amounts of bandwidth, and the freedom to put stickers all over your laptop! If you want to work at Yahoo!, do get in touch, and I will make sure your resume is on top of the pile.

So… most of my readers should already know by now (hi mom!), but here’s the news: in two weeks I shall begin working at Twitter. For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is, you should really get out from under that rock.

The office is located in downtown San Francisco. I’m going to learn me some Ruby and work on all things front-end, from the twitter.com site itself to, who knows, @anywhere.

I am so psyched about this opportunity, I’m having twouble spelling. If you too want to work at Twitter, hit @jointheflock or, if in Austin this week, you can stalk Twitter People.

In conclusion, if next year I don’t finally make it to SxSW, something is wrong. ;-)

Follow me @gaarf

Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta

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Nifty New Insider

Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta (windows download) was released yesterday. It is a major milestone for the instant messaging team, and for me in particular because it means the new insider page is now live! This is the project I have been working on for the past few months. It is essentially a mini version of the Yahoo! homepage built with YQL cloud technology, complete with mail, news, weather, search assist, a high-revenue ad position, alternate stylesheets (skins!), a location picker, and there’s even an easter egg or two. Go find them if you can. ;)

The page is intended to run “inside the IM client” but it works just fine in any modern browser window, too. Check it out here (you will need a Yahoo! id).

Moving back to Austin

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route from CA to TX

We have decided to move back to Austin, TX. Our appartement lease is up, all the stuff is in boxes, and I’m getting ready for the transition from too much Sushi to too much Mexican food.

I’ll still be working (remotely) for Yahoo!.

The dot in the middle of the map is Roswell, NM – where we will obviously stop for some dorky tourist trap. For realtime updates during the roadtrip follow the Twitter.

Bloodbath Redux

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I was not laid off today, but another set of co-workers were, including my immediate counterpart. Bits Blog (NYTimes.com) thinks that the Yahoo Layoffs Today May Not Be Last…

Yahoo began laying off 1,500 workers on Wednesday as part of a plan, announced in October, to slash expenses by $400 million a year. The cost cutting, however, may have to go deeper in the coming year.

“There could be additional staff reductions next year,” said Brad Williams, a Yahoo spokesman. “It depends on the decisions we make about prioritization, and on things we can’t predict in the economy.” Mr. Williams added: “We are trying to instill a culture of cost-discipline in our business.” [He] also said that the job cuts today will affect most parts of the company, but that Yahoo executives are still evaluating which projects will be de-emphasized or cut altogether. “This is more of a cost reduction rather than business prioritization,” he said about the layoffs. “Business prioritization will continue going forward. We are looking at businesses we may put into maintenance mode.”

Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, penned a farewell note to laid-off employees on the company’s blog. If you want to know how managers are supposed to notify employees whose jobs are being cut, check out Valleywag.

Sad day.

Yahoo! CEO Plans to Step Down

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Yahoo! said Monday evening that Jerry Yang, its chief executive, would step down from that role after the company finds a replacement.

Mr. Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo!, assumed control of the company a year and a half ago from Terry Semel, a Hollywood studio boss that he hand-picked for the job. His tenure has been a tumultuous period during which Yahoo! rejected a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft and failed to cement an advertising partnership with Google.