So right now I’m sitting in a booth on the Yahoo! campus, the same booth where I set a goal 20 months ago that one day I’d work for Yahoo! and….

[Wavy distorted omg we're going into a flashback. Begin narration]

My first experience on the Yahoo campus was for Y! HackDay 2008. I remember coming to the campus, being totally lost, and overwhelmed, almost like your first day of High School or College. I wasn’t an employee or anything. I was just a dumb programmer who wanted a taste of what Silicon Valley was really like. Seriously, I come from the startup world in Kansas City, I was in absolute awe of the place. This is where the Internet happens. Holy shit.

I came to HackDay armed with an idea for a hack to build, but was totally unable to focus, so I just sat around, tweeting, talking, and having fun. The music, the hacks, the food, the beer. I was totally awestruck when I talked to someone who worked at Yahoo!, especially the ones working on products I had used. I knew at that moment this was a place I’d always strive to work at. I knew I just *had* to work here, and be the person on the other end of that conversation.

Through the course of that weekend, I met a recruiter who for one reason or another took interest in my skills and said he’d follow up with me. I didn’t expect he would and he was just being nice. A couple weeks later I got a call from him stating he was interested in setting up an interview. I was shocked. “Ok, yeah, umm.. sure, anytime” I was so nervous before that first call. I reviewed just about every book I owned on programming, and I own a lot. I got the call and was speaking with an engineering manager who started asking me all sorts of questions about web development. In retrospect, I totally bombed it, and knew it. Rejected.

Down, but not out, I was focused, I knew it was attainable, but I just needed more time. So, over the next year I did just about everything I could to get my skills up to the level they needed to be for another crack at an interview, always keeping that original interview experience in mind. I had a blueprint. A plan.

A year later I got an email… “I’m back at Yahoo! Want another interview?” It was the original recruiter. “Yeah, absolutely.” The only goal I had this time was getting further than the first. I wouldn’t be totally bummed out if I didn’t get the job, but I at least wanted an on-site interview, just as validation I was making progress. Off I went, studying my ass off for about a week straight, so focused on the lone objective of nailing that phone-screen. The phone rang, and we started chatting. These questions were totally different from the first time. But that’s ok, I knew them. Apparently I did well, and I got an on-site.

The on-site (at the Santa Monica office) went well, and I got an offer. It was a big step leaving Kansas City, but one that I’d always regret if I stayed. So off I went, off to sunny SoCal. I started at the Santa Monica office working with the Entertainment team in November. Due to some mix-ups, I never did make it up here to Sunnyvale for training & orientation. Beyond that, there was never much need for me to be up here in person as we have tele-conferencing equipment galore, and these virtual meetings are in our DNA because we have offices around the country, and around the world.

So 5 months go by and I finally get up here for my first time. I’m actually glad I didn’t get up here before. I get to experience my first day at Yahoo, twice. I knew it was going to be weird, a good weird, and I knew that first time I came here was going to start flashing back. So here I am, sitting in the same booth, sipping my (free) mocha cappucino, admiring the courtyard, the weather, and the conversations going on around me. This is awesome. I have somewhere to be right now. But, nope…

If you haven’t set goals for yourself, do it. Set big ones. Set life-changing ones. When you achieve those, set higher ones, and just keep rolling. If you don’t have goals, find them. I stumbled across this one because I saw a tweet about HackDay, thought it sounded fun, and stepped on a plane to fly out here almost 2 years ago. Random. Lucky… Bold.

It’s feelings like this that you wish you could just bottle up and relive whenever you want.

So, I guess that’s the reason I’m writing this. A 30 minute slice of awesomeness, carved into this blog.

Coming into this job as the lead developer for MyCatholicVoice.com, I had zero experience running a project the size of where we have taken this. I had never built a web server this size from scratch (software-wise). But along the way, I’ve had to tackle hundreds, or heck… likely thousands of problems along the way, and I’ve learned something at every step. It’s been such an incredible learning experience as I’ve gained a bit of knowledge about so many different areas. These new skills include everything from cloud computing, systems architecture, to Linux administration, all the way to the front-end with JavaScript libraries. Then of course, that middle layer of PHP where my skills and knowledge have improved an unmeasurable amount.

When I started my career after graduation 5 years ago, I had a gameplan, a very iterative gameplan:

• Step 1: Get a job, anything.
• Step 2: Find a web development job, maybe it would be something that I wasn’t thrilled about or didn’t pay well, but it was at least enough to get me in the door as a programmer.
• Step 3: Find a job that paid a decent amount, but didn’t have to be a project I was passionate about.
• Step 4: Now that everything else is taken care of, find a project I was passionate about.

Beyond those 4 steps, I wasn’t sure exactly what came next. Perhaps it was starting my own company? Maybe moving out to the west coast? Maybe it wasn’t even in web development? In fact, mid-step 3, I considered changing careers because my job was just so unfulfilling. I enjoy cooking, so maybe Culinary school? Then I remembered I don’t like anything outside 10 foods, so nevermind that. I loved doing 3D animations in high school, but never pursued it because I can’t draw. So… I stuck it out and realized it was just my job, not my career choice, that was unsatisfying. Boom. Reenergized.

Well, tomorrow is the transition between from Step 4 to Step 5. This year I realized the next step for me was going to be moving to LA, SF, or Seattle. I needed to get to a tech hub where there were thousands of jobs, with companies large & small. But, there was also something from this last step that I was missing, that “passionate about the project” part. While I’m incredibly proud of the platform we’ve built at MyCatholicVoice, I’ve never been able to have much of a connection with our users. Why? I’m a non-Catholic working on a Catholic project. While I think the purpose of the project is a noble one and I agree with bringing “web 2.0″ to the Catholic church, it ultimately doesn’t effect me faith-wise. That’s a little bit of a bummer sometimes. I want to be a user of the product, as well as a developer.

Well, enter Yahoo. Talking about being a user of a product… Y! is one of the oldest services I still use from my first days on the internet in the mid-90s. Check out my last post for all the reasons I’m thrilled to have this opportunity.

So, what’s after what’s next? Hmmm….

When I attended Yahoo’s HackDay ’08 at their Sunnyvale headquarters, I was so impressed with the people, the event, the technology, and the culture at Yahoo, that I made working for Yahoo one of my career goals. Well, it came a little sooner than I expected, and I’m thrilled to say that starting Nov 23rd, 2009, I can scratch “A career with Yahoo” off my bucket list.

Why Yahoo?

There are a number of reasons why Yahoo is so appealing to me at this point in my career.

The Scale: As a developer, there is a lot of satisfaction in knowing that millions of people are happily using your products. With billions of pageviews per day across the Yahoo network of sites, there are only a handful of companies that can offer similar challenges as Yahoo (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and maybe a few others). At Yahoo, I expect to learn what it takes to code and assemble massively scalable web applications. Not many developers get a chance to work on products this large, and it is certainly an opportunity I find invaluable.

The Collective: Yahoo employs roughly 15,000 people, and thousands of those are software engineers working on some of the largest products used on the web. I’m confident that whatever problems I may run into on a daily basis, there is someone at Yahoo that has the knowledge to help me out. I can name dozens of current and former Yahoo employees that have inspired me in one way or another during my career, and I’m sure I’ll meet dozens more.

The Products: Yahoo certainly has its fair-share of best of breed products on the internet. The jewels are of course the Yahoo portal, Yahoo Mail, and Flickr. Beyond that, there are some other very successful products throughout the years, including; Yahoo Games, GeoCities, Messenger, Music, Movies, News, and Sports. All of which I’ve used extensively at one point or another. My first Yahoo account I created when I was 15, and I am now 28. There’s certainly a sense of pride and satisfaction knowing that I’ve been a happy customer of my future employer for 13 years.

The Culture: Yahoo puts an enormous amount of resources into their Developer Network and open-source technologies. As an advocate of open-source software, it’s a thrill to know I’m working for a company that values it as much as I do. It’s a shame that some of the neatest tools Yahoo has to offer are still unknown or unused by many developers (YQL, Pipes, & YUI), and I will certainly do my best to evangelize the incredible tools Yahoo has offered to the community.

The Location: Having lived in/near Kansas City my whole life, I love it here, but between October and March sometimes you wish you could take a vacation to Hell just so you can warm up a little bit. I’ve been to Southern California probably a dozen times throughout my life, and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of the ocean breeze, the palm trees, and the sunshine before you don’t want to ever leave.

Since I signed the paperwork and this whole thing became a reality, it has certainly taken a while to sink in. I still don’t think it has fully sunk in, and even after my going away party this weekend, boarding that flight to LA on the 22nd, it still may even take sitting down at my desk before I finally realize what just happened. So needless to say, I’m thrilled with the opportunity Yahoo has presented, and during my time there I will do my best to ensure it is as rewarding for them as it is for me.

Finally, I wanted to thank Fred & Mary Kay Fosnacht for sharing their dream with me over the last 3 years. Working for Catholic Content has been an amazing experience and certainly has been life-changing. I can safely say that my career wouldn’t have been the same without their confidence and encouragement and I will always be grateful for the opportunities they’ve given me.

Onward and upward.