I'm sad to say that last Thursday was my last day on the Examiner team. All good things come to an end, and it is time for me to transition to something different. So, what's next? In the near term, I'll be focusing on Vintage Digital LLC a bit. I'm planning on taking on additional contract work. I'm also on the prowl for a new full time work home. If you need or know a company that needs an awesome Internet Strategist/Product Manager/Project Manager, I'm your guy. Feel free to get in touch if you have contract or full time work available.

If you are curious about my experience, you can check out my LinkedIn Profile.

But what an amazing ride! In 2009 I was brought into the Examiner team to shepherd the migration of the site, in cold fusion, to Drupal 7. Keep in mind that Drupal 7 wasn't much yet - it was committed to HEAD, but it wasn't even near an Alpha state. In fact, it wasn't going to be ready for release until January of 2011.

Over the last two and a half years, this has been the most ambitious, fantastic, and wild ride of my life. I drank from the fire hose. I have grown as a manager in so many ways and I have built life long friendships.

I was pretty much 24/7 on the job, often jumping on my iPad so I could easily get onto IRC to work with the team, a team spread across the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. I've been through hundreds of releases. Major releases had me working at 5:45 am or midnight.

At the end of every project, I like to take time to reflect.

We accomplished so much in this time.

• Migration and redesign of a GIANT website from Cold Fusion to Drupal 7 using MongoDB in tangent with MySQL in a mere 9 months
• Migration of the back-end tools of Examiner over the following 4 months or so, including all Examiner Management tools
• Numerous integrations with 3rd party systems
• An email to post system
• A complex publishing system that included many pieces of rich media
• Two payment systems
• Design and Implementation of an amazing Scrum/Agile management process
• Migration from Trac to Jira with Greenhopper
• A comprehensive writer rewards system
• Varnish Caching
• Sailthru Integration for all system email
• A system for sending subscriptions to readers of the site when writers publish
• A bunch of really silly faux bios

I have been blessed to have worked with a fantastic team extending far beyond the immediate Examiner development group. I want to call out some of the folks I've worked with over the last 30 months and thank them.

You all have made me better at what I do. I apologize to those I've forgotten to include. This list isn't any particular order.

• Jeremy Andrews
• Fairlight Baer-Gutierrez
• Brandon Bergren
• Kevin Bridges
• Richard Burford
• Nathaniel Catchpole
• Dave Cohen
• Balint Csuthy
• Jason Davis
• Becki Dilworth
• Alan Evans
• John Ferris
• John Fiala
• Jordan Friedlander
• Peter Galiba
• Doug Green
• Morbus Iff
• Stacey Harrison
• Marc Ingram
• Caleb Thorne
• Jodi Mesa
• Michael Meyers
• Balazs Nagykekesi
• Karoly Negyesi
• Narayan Newton
• Matthew Nichols
• Andy Packard
• Dave Rager
• Keith Stansell
• Rok Zlender
• Travis Henry
• Juan Perez
• Dave Flomberg
• Rudy Grigar
• Kelley Babin
• Al Steffen
• Andy Lasda
• Rob McKinney
• Victor Ortiz
• Oleg Terenchuk
• Attila Agoston
• Jimmy Berry
• Moshe Weitzman
• Konstantine Kaefer
• Dave Cohen
• Gill Carroll
• The AdminGeekz crew
• Jim Davidson
• Ashish Kapur
• Jamshid Khazenie
• Paul Yanover

Examiner, so long and thanks for all fish!