Friday, June 17, 2011

All good things...

It is with great difficulty that I find myself writing this post. After 4+ years with reddit, today is my last day with the company. It is now time for reddit (inc.) and me to part ways. Unfortunately for y'all, reddit will still be a huge part of my life, and I will still be a heavy participant. I will just be a civilian now.

reddit has been the driving force in my life for a long time now. Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is check all of reddit's critical systems. Then do the same thing again every night, and many many times in between, even on vacation, or my honeymoon. Just ask my wife, who refers to reddit as my not-so-secret mistress, and would agree that it was the cause of many arguments between us! It will be hard getting used to sleeping until the alarm goes off and not reaching for the monitoring page when I first open my eyes. Luckily, the new team of folks is ready to take the reigns. I have every confidence that they will carry the torch and carry it well. I have no doubt that they will stick to the philosophies that we all hold so dear as a community, and make reddit far greater than it already is.

It's been a really wild ride these last 4 years. There are far too many awesome things to list them all, but here are some of the highlights for me. It started with me joining Steve, Alexis and Chris as the first employee of the company, and then helping move the entire datacenter from Boston to SF (all 8 machines!) just a few weeks later. Then we did our monthlong press tour, where we got just as excited about meeting well known redditors like raldi as they were about meeting us. Then we open sourced, which was great for us and hopefully the python community at large. I got the chance to meet famous people like Ron Paul to film his interview along with Hueypriest, as well as Felicia Day and Peter Norvig. I've been immortalized in drawings and fan art. My friend made me a reddit wedding cake when I got married last year. We created the biggest gift exchange in the world. I was redditor of the day. I did a (now horribly out of date) AMA. And then there was the rally, where I literally got to give a dedicated redditor the shirt off my back. At the same time, reddit's traffic has grown like mad. When I started, we had 1.3M uniques and 40M pageviews in a month. In May we had 18.8M uniques and 1.228 billion pageviews.

And I got to be a part of all of it, keeping those servers running so that people could do all these amazing things. That is really what got me to commute more than 2 hours every day for this job -- the thought of the people behind the computers who I was enabling to communicate and interact with each other. That, and the 100's of postcards on the office wall.

I am also amazingly proud of the good that this community has become known for. Raising money for charity and just generally helping people. One of my most salient memories is when two strangers met on reddit and helped a grandma in need in Japan after the earthquake. I tell that story to people all the time when they ask what keeps me motivated.

So what's next for me? Well, I don't actually have anything lined up just yet. My newfound free time will enable me to pursue a lot of projects that I've been wanting to work on for a while, like advising startups at Year One Labs and Dishcrawl. Or perhaps focus more on my writing. Or if you have any interesting leads on something, you could let me know. Once I do land something, there are myriad ways to keep up with me Twitter and my website, which I will finally have some time to update, are good places to start.

It seems someone has begun to cut onions here, so I shall leave with these parting words: Each and every one of you is awesome in your own way, and that is what makes reddit so great. Thank you all for your amazingness these last 4+ years.

In honor of the occasion, Zach Weiner, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has graciously provided a comic to sum up this blog post.

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