After two and a half years working on webmail for Yahoo!, it’s time to move on to something else. I’m not leaving Yahoo!, just the world of mail. Over the past two months I’ve been working on a new project (that I can’t really talk about) that has taken me away from mail into something entirely different. I’m not sure if I like it yet, time will tell. On the one hand, it’s nice to work on something else. On the other hand, webmail is something I have done for so long that it’s part of who I am. I walk around Yahoo! and people know me as “the mail guy”. I drop in on the Y-Mail Yahoo! Group and everybody knows me as “the Yahoo! Mail engineer”. The sad thing is, that only scratches the surface of how much webmail has been a part of my life.
I started college as a Physics major. Eventually, I changed majors to chemistry and biochemistry. While working in the Chemistry Studio Classroom, I took over webmaster duties of the chemweb.calpoly.edu website. I had been hooked by the web when I started college, so I loved putting the web together with my chemistry background. While taking summer classes in 1998, I started working on my first CGI scripts. They were simple and poorly written AppleScript programs that allowed students to take an assessment exam on the web, submit their answers and have their grade on the exam returned to them. The exam results were dumped into an Excel spreadsheet (later a FileMaker database) for the teachers to examine later. While playing with the web server software, I became interested in an accompanying mail server. The mail server stored messages in a file, making it easy to read using AppleScript. Hours later, my first webmail application was born.
From there I was hooked. I started taking computer science classes in an effort to change majors (yet again). The science department put me on academic probation for not making progress towards my degree. The engineering department informed me that I’d have to significantly raise my GPA for consideration. I pulled through and a few quarters later, I was officially a computer science major.
In October 1999, I attended the on campus job fair. I wasn’t looking too seriously, I still had 8 months until graduation. But one company stood out: Excite (I think this was shortly before the “@Home” was appended). I talked to an alumni who was there recruiting with his boss (who was sitting behind the table with a cold). We talked for a while, reminisced about a teacher we had both taken a particularly difficult class with. I interviewed with him the next day and was eventually flown to Redwood City in December for another round of interviews.
When the dust settled, I was 6 months from graduation with offers from two teams. One did user registration and the other…webmail. The choice was clear and in April I started working part-time from school on Excite Inbox. I didn’t get much work done, but I did manage to learn most of the codebase, some of the environment and I had made enough part-time pay to buy a new car. I started full time in June 2000 with 6.5 million worldwide users. Excite was a great environment and I was working on my pet project while being paid (well) to do it. Everything was going great…and then the bubble burst. Excite@Home filed bankruptcy in December 2001, webmail was sold to iWon, my friends were laid off and I was put on simple tasks helping to dismantle what was left of the company for sale.
My (then) girlfriend and I fled to Folsom, a small town east of Sacramento. I had found work with a contracting company in Sacramento, doing website work for the Saturn Car Company and Genentech. The work was decent, the experience was nice and I was working with a friend (the one who interviewed me in college). We were living close to my wife’s family and had managed to afford a house. But something was still missing. I missed working for an internet company on things that mattered.
In May 2003 an old product manager from Excite hit me up to let me know that EarthLink was hiring a webmail engineer. I interviewed badly, but convinced the hiring manager (over email) that I wasn’t the idiot I sounded like during the phone interview. I joined EarthLink and set to work on rewriting their webmail system. They didn’t have a lot of users, but the engineer I worked with was smart and entertaining and it was, after all, webmail again. I wrote a spiffy spell check for webmail (something I was supposed to do at Excite but never got prioritized), cursed IMAP servers, worked with close friends from Excite and college and generally had a good time. Eventually, when the app was mostly done, I transfered to another project that was eventually canceled.
Around October 2004, my old boss from Excite came calling. He was managing mail, address book and calendar at Yahoo! and he wanted me to come interview. I had been pushing him off for some time, but once EarthLink ran out of things for me to do it was hard to say “no”. He pitched me on writing (another) mail web service for him (I maintained one and wrote another from scratch at Excite) so they could pair the Oddpost frontend with the Yahoo! Mail backend. It seemed like a sweet gig and they offered to significantly raise my salary, so I (of course) said “yes”. Two and a half years, 250 million users, two web service rewrites, one web service public launch, one talk at the Sunnyvale Open Hack Day, one talk at the London Open Hack Day and one stint as the Yahoo! Mail Beta Evangelist later and here we are.
It’s going to be hard for a little while. Not working on webmail anymore feels a bit like having my identity stripped from me. I hope my stock as a hacker, developer, dragon slayer and generally good guy is enough for a while while I start building up my credibility in a new domain. In the meantime, it’s back to work for me, starting from scratch (although thankfully not in AppleScript this time). Who knows, maybe I’ll find the next thing to identify myself by in this project.
Another November 15th, another annual notch in my 
