ryan kennedy’s blog

I have a lot more I want to say about the Yahoo! Mail Web Service release, but I’m dead tired already and I want to make sure I do this first.

First thanks have to go to my former boss, David Koblas. He rescued me from a fate worse than death (boredom) at EarthLink and brought me to Yahoo! to work on the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. Without this opportunity, it’s unlikely that an open mail web service would have ever happened.

To the team of engineers who worked on and with the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, thanks. This includes people on my immediate team and those on other teams who use the web service, providing feedback and bug reports. There are way too many people to name here and I’ll likely forget to include someone, so I’ll just leave it like this. If you wrote a line of code in the web service or wrote a line of code that talked to the web service, thanks.

To the product people, you could have easily gone the other direction and kept Yahoo! Mail a closed system. Instead you embraced the idea of an open platform and encouraged us wholeheartedly. Thanks.

To the Yahoo! Developer Network, you’ve all been amazing in the last month helping us out with sample code, documentation, screencasts and setting up the developer site. It’s difficult to think of any group within Yahoo! that has been more supportive in getting this web service out into the world. Thanks.

To the hackers who stayed up until the wee hours with me at Open Hack Day, I had a great time watching and helping you build awesome applications on the pre-release version of our web service, forging the way for future Yahoo! Mail hackers. Thanks.

Lastly, to my wonderful, understanding and infinitely patient wife…Lisa. I’ve poured so much of the last 2+ years into this project, sometimes at the expense of our relationship. When this project took me to the brink of physical collapse in the last 5 months, you were there to take care of me. You’ve been incredibly understanding, knowing how much this project has meant to me and your encouragement when things were tough kept me going. Thanks and I love you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:36 am and is filed under Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.