After almost exactly 10 years touring the West coast (Seattle, LA, San Francisco Bay Area), Anne and I (and Audrey too!) are moving back East, to Boston. It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a long time, but things have been good at Yahoo, and it didn’t seem like I could leave that.

The good news is that I don’t really have to leave it. I’m going to continue working for Yahoo as an Architect for our Video Platform. I’ll be based in the Cambridge office along with the team from Maven Networks, acquired by Yahoo! in February. Maven’s offices are literally across the street from where I worked at Firefly in 1997-1998. We have many fond memories of our time there.

While I will be leaving Yahoo! News and the engineering team I largely built, I’ll be taking on new and interesting responsibilities. For one, I’ll be helping the Cambridge team integrate with the rest of Yahoo. Hopefully my experience as the acquiree as part of LAUNCH back in 2001 will be helpful there. We also did a lot of audio and video streaming there of course, so that knowledge will also come in handy. I still have nightmares about debugging LAUNCHcast using Flash 4.0 and the RealPlayer Netscape plugin running in Netscape 4.73 on a Mac. Thankfully the technology has come a long way since then.

Over the years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people at Yahoo and how things work, so that should be another skill I can put to use there. I’m sure I’ll be bouncing back and forth to Sunnyvale and Dallas frequently as I work with the various Yahoo offices that comprise our Video team.

Six years is a long time to stay in any job and I’ve learned a hell of a lot. As my team and responsibilities grew bigger, I got further and further away from the technology that brought me into this industry in the first place. While I quelled that with coding projects on the side at work and at home, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in technology problems again as part of my day-to-day job.

The whole opportunity has been in the works for months now and I’m happy to finally share it with everyone. It’s been very difficult to have to hide the most significant thing going on in my life from family, friends and coworkers for many weeks. We didn’t even tell our families until I had accepted the position as to not upset them if it fell through. They’re thrilled to soon be within an hour or two of their granddaughter.

After I talked to many of the Video team members here in Sunnyvale, I made plans to visit the Cambridge office in late April. I left on a Sunday afternoon, spent the day in the office, then took a late flight back on Monday. What I failed to realize was that was also Patriots’ day in Massachusetts which means it was the day of the Boston Marathon. That would have been fine except for my return flight which was full of sweaty, smelly marathon runners including the woman who sat next to me and who ran it finish to start AND back again a few hours before.

We don’t know where we will live yet, but we hope to buy a house somewhere within reasonable commuting distance to Cambridge. We’ll be crashing with family and friends until we find a place. The plan is to leave here around the 7th of June, just 2 1/2 short weeks away.

When Anne and I first moved out to the West coast, we thought we would stay a few years, but never anticipated 10. We even joked that we’d return when the Big Dig was done, which is a nice way of not making any commitment at all. Well the joke’s on us now. The Big Dig actually finished and we’re Boston bound. It will be good to get back to a place where they have actual seasons of the year (even the cold ones) and where the Red Sox play every night on basic cable.

For my friends on the West coast – thanks, but you won’t be able to miss me too much as I’ll be back often. For my friends and family on the East coast, I look forward to seeing you again and more often.

Boy we have a lot of junk to pack up.