Christian Heilmann at Yahoo!
Well, that was fun! A few weeks ago I finally signed up for LinkedIn, after realizing that EVERYBODY else in the industry was on there. I found a few former co-workers, including Christian from Netdecisions in London. (I voluntarily took a layoff package in 2001 to save Christian’s job, which also allowed me to emigrate to Australia. The rest, as they say, is history.) Anyway, I added him, he added me, and then I visited his blog. To my surprise, I saw that he was now a fancypants “Developer Evangelist” for Yahoo! and that he was coming to Sydney this week! The Snook and I quickly signed up to attend.

The Sydney Yahoo! offices are stunning. They also won immediate points with me by not requiring me to sign an NDA just to walk in the door (like Google did). They had good beer too. There were maybe 40 or so of us there, and Christian’s talk was entertaining and enlightening. You can read my tweets from the event here. He succeeded in getting me to think seriously about using some Yahoo tools and libraries for my next site redesign. Afterwards there was food and everybody mingled, and we got to catch up a bit. Man, was it really that long ago? When Snookums and I lived on Rannoch Road with Alex and Condie, and we spent the cold nights in pubs arguing over the finer points of HTML? Good times, good times.