Yahoo! Year in Review

Here’s my own personal Yahoo! Year in Review (i.e. the highlights of my job in 2003):

• In January, I started my new role as an Engineering Manager, leading my own 3-person team. The change of job responsibilities was just the thing to get me charged up about work again.
• A month later I finally got rid of my home office and started working in Santa Monica at the Yahoo! LAUNCH office.
• In March I got the good news that my Targeted Advertising Patent application had been published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We submitted the application back in the Fall of 2001, but it takes the USPTO a long time to review these things. Hopefully the patent will issue in 2004.
• That same month I got news from my boss that my group (developer tools and core software infrastructure) was going to be growing in size. We started interviewing candidates, and by the beginning of August my group had grown from 3 to 7 engineers.
• In July, I spoke at OSCON 2003 in Portland. I got to have a beer with my buddy Sam Jackson who I hadn’t seen in about 5 years, and I met a few cool folks like David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg.
• I spent a good deal of time in July and August training Andrei and Ryan, the two newest members of my team.
• I gave my “One Year of PHP at Yahoo!” talk at PHPCon West 2003 in Santa Clara. This conference was more schmoozing than sessions; I spent quality time with Ze’ev, Rinat, Zak, George, Sterling, Thies, Shane, James, Luke & Laura, and local Yahoo!s Andrei and Brian. I also met Brian from Microsoft, who seemed like a really nice guy.
• I spent most of the remaining part of the year working on annual performance reviews. It was amazingly difficult and time-consuming, but I’m hopeful that it was worth the effort. The opportunity to reflect upon my group’s work over the past year made me proud of our accomplishments.
• As a result of my new people-management job, I didn’t manage to write too much code this past year. Our CVSdb checkin database shows that I added 7,257 LOC to the codebase this year, compared to 21,928 LOC in 2002.

There is only an hour and a half until the New Year, so I think that’s enough for 2003.