I registered this domain ten years ago today, sitting in the chair by the window in my brother's apartment in Clapham South -- I had just moved to the UK from Trinidad, and hadn't found my own apartment yet.

The 10th anniversary of this blog is a little further away -- the site was mostly static until March 2001. This morning I grabbed a quick set of screenshots of some of the oldest designs of the site; they are pretty funky.

Today is my last day at Yahoo!. It's been four years -- more than twice as long as I've held any other job.

I remember very clearly, when I was fifteen and had had Internet access for only a few weeks, building my first web page and thinking "wow! This is fun! I wish I could get a job doing this!" Then I tried to think of big, web companies I'd really want to work for, and the first one was Yahoo!. "But they've already built their website", I thought to myself, "They don't need another web developer. Plus, I don't know Perl."

So nine years later, when Yahoo! contacted me and offered me a job in the London office, it was a dream come true. I sent excited emails to friends and family, I printed out a huge "I WORK FOR YAHOO" banner above my desk at home (in a stolen copy of the Yahoo! font). I know it sounds terribly cheesy, but I really did.

Joining Yahoo! was amazing. We're so *big*! We have our own fork of Apache, our own version of PHP, dozens and dozens of our own specialized products and plugins (I love yinst!). In my very first week, I was already making changes to websites seen by millions of people (the FIFA world cup site). And the resources we can draw on! The devel-frontend list taught me volumes about CSS and Javascript, as did internal training for YUI.

For a young web developer, there is absolutely no better place to work than here. I got to build not just big sites but great sites, working with people who are absolutely at the top of their game in every department -- design, engineering, ops, and QA. Plus there are hack days -- I love hack days! You get to build the coolest thing you can think of, as fast as you can, and show it off to hundreds of appreciative engineers. There's very few places in the world where you can do that.

Yahoo! has made me a better web developer, a better engineer, and a better teammate. I have learned so much from this company, and for that I am deeply, truly grateful. Being a Yahoo has been a big part of my life -- and I know, from seeing it in others, that you never really stop being a Yahoo, even when you're working somewhere else.

So then, why am I leaving? Because I have grown as much as I can. In my first year I grew as a web developer, in JS and CSS. In my second I grew as an engineer, architecting a whole website from scratch. In my third I grew as a database developer -- I became "the database guy" to some of you, which I still think is funny. I'm a web guy! But in this last year I have mostly grown frustrated. I'm not saying I have nothing more to learn, but I need to go somewhere else to learn it.

Last Thursday, I informed my managers at Yahoo! that I will be leaving the company. I have a lot of thoughts about leaving Yahoo!, and I'm going to assemble them into another post later. For now I want to talk about the new gig.

A while back, Jonathan invited me out to dinner. We'd worked together for a year on the dream team that was Yahoo! Widgets before it got mothballed, and he wanted to talk about some ideas he had around entertainment, social media and the Internet.

In a way that is characteristic of him, he started speaking fluently, passionately, and with all the focus of a terminal ADD sufferer about friends of his who are media types who make web content. About how they use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and sites like those -- what he collectively termed "social media", a buzzwordy phrase, but usefully short.

Mostly, content creators use social media haphazardly at best. Not because they're dumb, but because there are so many sites for them to use, each with different use-cases and conventions and tools. Knowing about and using more than a fraction of their capability is a full-time job, and most media organizations aren't big enough to dedicate a full person to that role.

He also talked about metrics, and "closing the loop" on social media. At the moment people who pump content into these various sites get only the most basic idea of how successful they're being. They see view counts on YouTube, basic stats on Flickr, and on Twitter they can kinda-sorta track your retweets (except when you can't), or you can search for links to your content, except when you can't. The stats aren't always there, and even when they are it's hard to get the big picture.

There is, he said, a business opportunity here. I agreed, and said I wish I could help him out -- but, being on an L-1 visa at the time, I knew I couldn't. I also have another post in store about that.

Today Jonathan has taken that idea and gotten a lot further with it: he has founded a company called Snowball Factory (we're going to work on that logo), and with the able assistance of Cloudspace it's launched three products -- the flagship awe.sm, as well as two smaller tools, TweetPo.st and fbShare.me. Collectively, they're helping tame the beast of social media -- making it easier to use, more measurable, and more effective.

This is a hard, hard problem. In fact, it's five or six hard problems. It involves taking enormous amounts of data and boiling them down to simple conclusions, and wrapping complex APIs into simple, usable user interfaces. It involves making websites that scale, and APIs that are powerful but easy to use. And the result is that the web, as a whole, gets better. In short, it's not just building a website; it's developing the web. It's what I'm all about.

Jonathan has a lot more ideas, and I've got more than a few of my own. And starting next week, I will be joining Snowball Factory as employee #1 and technical lead (and co-founder, and janitor, and CTO, and tea boy, and sysadmin -- when you're employee #1, you get a lot of job titles, but I'm sticking with "technical lead" for now).

I'm extremely excited. Joining a startup is what I came to the bay area hoping to do, and after three years at Yahoo!, I'm doing it, and I'm in pretty much as early as you can be. It's going to be hard -- expect a lot of annoyed tweets about technical difficulties -- and the hours will be long, and there will be setbacks as well as triumphs. But it's going to be an awesome (and awe.sm) ride.

I have written a mini-review of Google Buzz over on Flickr, should you wish to check it out.

The US supreme court, in a split decision, has ruled that corporations are people, free to spend on political campaign advertising as a form of free speech. This is a terrible decision that threatens the foundation of democracy.

Corporations have different goals to people. They are about their own survival, and act in nobody's interests but their own. Customers? They're out to screw them for every cent the market will bear. Ditto suppliers. Employees? There to be used up and thrown away as soon as it's profitable to get rid of them. Executives? To be sacrificed every time the stock drops, or forced out as part of a merger or acquisition. Shareholders? Love them -- until things get tough. Then declare chapter 11, wipe them out, and find some new suckers.

By declaring corporations people, we have created a new species, parasitic upon our own, and significantly stronger. Corporations will suck us in, use us up, and spit us out, without regard for wealth or class. There will be no lucky ones: we will all be the losers. Once they are in control, the best efforts of humanity will be subjugated to the survival of the corporations. They will wreck our environment, because they do not need to breathe. They have no interest in our health or our life-spans. They don't care whether we're happy, and they don't care if we like them. They only care about other corporations.

Democracy is government by the people and for the people. By declaring corporations people we subvert democracy, pushing towards political goals that are dramatically contrary to our own interests as human beings. This is a genie that needs to be put back in its bottle, immediately, before it is too late.

So the iTablet is coming, or so it seems, and everyone is reading tea-leaves, so here's my own swing:

I know this is ridiculous, but the moment I saw this invitation and this tweet from Ricky, I thought: what if the tablet isn't a device on its own? What if it is more like a Wacom tablet -- not a full device on its own, but more of a peripheral?

Imagine a device the size of a mousepad. It sits on your desk, replacing the mouse itself. It syncs to your mac, and displays a picture of the screen itself -- or a portion of the screen. It acts like a touch screen, or if you want it to, a drawing tablet (it would let you "zoom in" on the drawing area, like Mobile Safari does). In addition to ordinary clicks, you'd be able to use a variety of gestures to simplify various tasks. Applications that were compatible with the device could send dedicated UI to the tablet itself, giving you a range of buttons and tools within a fingertip's reach -- this would be pretty useful in Photoshop, for instance, but other apps as well.

So then you're done drawing your picture on your big screen, and you want to walk across the room and show it to somebody, or take it home with you to work on your home machine. You just pick it up, and walk away. Your tablet has a copy of the document. You can work on it, annotate it, mail it to people, and if you take it to another Mac, it can transfer it right across. Quickly, seamlessly, in the best Apple style. Of course, because it's sort of like an iPhone, it will also have apps and dedicated services, but where it will really shine is as an ultraportable extension of your existing system.

If it were true, this solves a couple of key questions surrounding the tablet:

1. Jobs has been delaying a tablet for years because it needs to be useful for more than "surfing the web in the bathroom". So if they do reveal a tablet, it's going to come with a use-case nobody's thought of so far. Sure, it might work as an eBook reader too, but Steve doesn't want to build one of those, so I doubt that will be the primary use-case.
2. There's been a lot of buzz about the fact that the tablet may be using gestures in some new way, since Apple recently took down the website of FingerWorks, a gestural-input startup they acquired five whole years ago. FingerWorks' primary product was called, coincidentally, the iGesture Pad, and (though I didn't know this when I started writing this) it has all the mouse-replacement features I talked about: clicking, scrolling, dragging, etc.
3. Finally, lots of people have asked: if I already have an iPhone and a Mac desktop or laptop, why do I need a tablet? Is there really a gap in the market there? And this answers the question: it doesn't replace your iMac or your Powerbook, it complements both -- hell, it might even sync with your iPhone too.

All of which leads me to say that if this isn't what the iTablet is, then they should get started on something like this right away. But maybe they had this idea five years ago, when they bought FingerWorks, and it's taken all this time to get it right. In which case, I expect to be very excited indeed when I see what they've come up with.

A ridiculously misleading letter from Wells Fargo is trying to scam their own customers out of $156/year under the pretect of a "free" credit report. I expect better from a reputable national bank.

First Alan Williamson asked if Amazon EC2 has become oversubscribed. Then Cloudkick jumped in with graphs illustrating the increased latency seen by spot instances. Amazon has denied there's any fundamental issue. But let's look at that graph:

Something struck me about the timing: the trouble all seems to kick off round the 12th of December: that's the day Amazon announced EC2 spot instances. The way spot instances work is simple: Amazon puts its spare capacity up for auction. Instead of paying a set price, you bid for an instance, and the highest bids that fill up available instances win. If more people turn up demanding instances, the price should rise.

But there's a side effect: assuming spot instances are popular, then we can assume that no matter what the price is, all of EC2 capacity is now being used. What would you expect to happen if that were the case? Well, you'd expect them to start hitting capacity limits -- which is what the ping times seem to suggest is happening.

At the moment this is just my theory. Anybody else got any evidence that might back it up? It would be really nice to see what's been happening to EC2 spot prices over the last month, for instance.

The details are fuzzy. I think I was about eight years old at the time. I was in the car with my mother, in Trinidad, driving from our house on the hill in Curepe towards the junction with the Eastern Main Road. We were just passing the corner where a hand-painted sign advertising "BROILERS $5.00"*. My mother had the radio tuned to the cricket. Somebody else was in the car -- I think it was my best friend at the time, Dari -- and he asked what the score was.

I'm not a fan of cricket, or indeed of any sport. Something fundamental about being a spectator to those sorts of activities escapes me. Coming from a family of sports fan, and already in possession of my gleeful contrarian streak, I quickly announced that I didn't know. In fact, I said, I didn't even understand what the scores meant -- runs and overs and wickets and things.

My mother told Dari the score, and then gave me a very mild rebuke for being so forcefully ignorant of the sport -- this was not the first time I'd done something like this. "It's never cool to not know something, Laurie," she said.

I doubt she even remembers making the comment. It wasn't an important "sit down and get this straight" moment. It was just something she said over her shoulder as she negotiated traffic. She meant that I shouldn't try to stand out from my peers by being deliberately ignorant about things (an emerging habit of mine at the time). She meant that there were better ways to define myself than by what I was not. But it hit home, in a way that things your parents say sometimes do, and it's stayed with me to this day. It's practically the defining tenet of my life.

Starting that day, I never turned down information. I can't say I eagerly sought out information on the byzantine rules of cricket, but I didn't ignore them when they came my way. Since then, when faced with anything new, I have tried to understand it, even if it doesn't interest me. The principle that became embedded in my brain was much broader, and it was that ignorance is uncool. As such I have tried very hard, ever since, to never be ignorant about anything, ever.

It created that infovore that I am today. I absorb anything and everything that falls into my path. One of my most-used phrases is "I once read an article about...". Pick a random topic and I'm not going to know much, but chances are I will have at least one random fact lying around, some connection I can make to my existing store of trivia.

Would I have been like that even if my mother had never said anything that day? Probably, I suppose. But probably not so soon, or so firmly. It's definitely one of those pivotal moments in my life, when a single remark shapes everything that happens afterwards. And I'm grateful for it.

For web nerds, I have revived my long-defunct web development blog with a post about non-spammy website promotion that will hopefully be useful. It includes the phrase "Social Media Optimization" but other than that it is relatively free of douchebaggery.