I look forward to joining the ranks of former Schemers Robert Swarthout and Paul Amsbary, and fellow PHP community members such as Derek Gathright and Sara Golemon.

I’m sad to make this move as I’ve seen Schematic grow from ~120 people up to near 400. We’ve added offices around the globe and entire business units. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented developers, technology leaders, project managers, and account managers. I’ve worked on some amazing projects with some of the most appreciative, cutting-edge clients you could ever ask for.

Before joining Schematic, I worked for Community Connect Inc. (now Interactive One) for almost five years, building and maintaining functionality across various social networking sites, such as BlackPlanet.com, AsianAve.com, and MiGente.com. I enjoyed this product-centric environment where any developer could take ownership of a product, then watch it grow and flourish over time. These opportunities are a bit more rare in the agency world, where you’re generally building, delivering, then moving on to the next big effort.

I’m very excited to get back into a product-focused environment. I’ll have the opportunity to sharpen my skills with client-side technologies, along with other languages and platforms. I’m very much looking forward to focusing 100% of my time on architecture and development as I might have gotten a little rusty over the past year or two.

So, thanks, Schematic! It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to perfect my Yahoo! yodel. Best of luck to you!

It was great to meet some new, non-PHP-specific faces in the southern iPhone and mobile communities. The crowd seemed to be quite tech-heavy, rather than business-heavy. As such, I learned some new things such as how to handle analytics on the iPhone (use Flurry), how to reduce latency when using Core Audio, and some new-to-me information on parsing XML on the iPhone.

I also dusted off my talk, “Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools”, trimmed it down for a 30-minute timeslot, and presented it as “WURFL, Device Identification, and Mobile Media”.

My talk seemed to go great because, hey, what talk with a little Rickrolling and Ice Ice Baby isn’t going to be a hit, right? It was tough to keep it to that smaller timeslot, but it seemed to work well. I was followed by everyone’s favorite Microsoft evangelist, Glen Gordon, who was speaking on all things Microsoft.

I definitely walked away with a continued motivation to actually produce a useful Cocoa and/or iPhone app sometime this year, so I’d better hop to it. It’s the ideation part that’s tough for me, though. And all of the graphic design can be a bit demotivating, too, but there are creative ways to handle that.

Anyways, it was a great event! Hopefully they’ll conduct one again next year! Special thanks to Jonathan Freeman of Widgetpress (and all involved) for organizing the event!

Also, special thanks to all Atlanta PHP attendees for allowing me to use them as my guinea pigs before taking new talks out to conferences. You regulars know that I’ve done this with other talks in the past. You’re a very gracious, brave bunch, so thanks, everyone!

See you all there!

She’s a 7.5 week old Beagle, born on 11/7/2007. We’ve got to get adjusted to housetraining her now and all that fun stuff, along with having another living, breathing thing in the house (other than a plant!). See below for the obligatory bytes (ha!):

Click here for photos

And click here for a YouTube video of her

I was reading through the August 3rd paper and came across this piece in “The Vent:”

“I have been banished to living in Brooklyn, and I am craving Chick-fil-A, sweet tea, hot humid steamy weather and even Spaghetti Junction. When I am released from this prison, I will be looking for a new employer and I will never, ever leave the ATL again!”

So, there you have it. An Atlanta local made the move to Brooklyn and regrets it…mightly timely if you ask me.

P.S.: Polishing up my Who’s Online with Memcached post soon!

So, things are coming together! Our collective savings account is growing a little smaller each day, but that’s a small price to pay for being homeowners.

More to come shortly! I’ve also setup apple2peach.com to blog on the NYC-to-ATL transition. I’ll find the time to get that site going soon. Stay tuned!

Special thanks to everyone in New York that’s been so special to me (and us!) over the years. Friends, family, co-workers and all…we’re sad to leave, but it’s exciting to take on a slower-paced, arguably more “normal” life…and our sweet new house!

We’ll be back from time to time, so we’re not gone forever! See you soon, New York…

See more house pictures below:

House progress photos here

See the new photos

House progress pictures

House progress pictures