Lunch with smart people
A few weeks back I received email from Toni Schneider. As is commonly the case with people emailing me out of the blue, he had a problem with his Yahoo! Mail account. Anyway, during the course of getting him and his BlackBerry squared away, we got to talking about catching up. So today I popped up to San Francisco and met up with him for lunch.
Toni invited Matt Mullenweg, which was cool. Matt has responded to my past posts on Akismet, which I think is great. For the longest time I tried to keep up with every blog post about Yahoo! Mail, trying desperately to keep up with the stuff people were writing and even more desperately to try to respond to everything in the comments. It’s exhausting, but rewarding work. It’s difficult to find people with the passion to do that.
It was fun talking with them, listening to some of the stuff they have to deal with on WordPress.com. Many of the issues parallel what we have to deal with in the mail world. Storage, abuse, spam and so on. The usage patterns are different, but at the same time there are many parallels.
It was fun. I got to talk old times with Toni and I got to talk shop with Matt. I really found during the London hack day that I enjoy the more social end of the job now. Hanging out with generally smart people, having a good time, talking about whatever interesting topics come up. Now that I’ve moved back to the Bay Area I’m basically surrounded by smart people with similar interests. Hopefully this is just the start.
