Today is my first day at Facebook. I’m joining the Safety and Security team in Facebook’s DC engineering office.
After just over three years at Brocade and longer working on OpenDaylight, it’s a big change and not a decision that I came to lightly. Let’s keep it short here through. My time at Brocade was amazing. I have learned so much about how to take open source, productize it, sell it, support it, and make money doing it. The team is incredible and will keep being incredible. I wish them all the best.
OpenDaylight is going strong—serving over a billion end users in production and growing. Working with the community will likely be the most rewarding thing I’ve done for some time to come. While my day job at Facebook won’t involve OpenDaylight, I do intend to remain part of the community insofar as that is possible.
The opportunity at Facebook lets me pursue another one of my long-time passions: the intersection of society, law, technology, and (inevitably) politics. I almost went to law school instead of getting my PhD in computer science. Even during my PhD, I helped run a society and technology (SocTech) seminar bringing engineering, law, sociology and other students together around different issues each quarter.
Working on hard problems at the edge of these areas where it directly impacts the over 2 billion people who use Facebook and indirectly shapes how humanity connects is simply too good to pass up.
Please don’t be a stranger. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, in D.C., and wherever else. I’m sure I will cross paths with most of you and meet many new people as I move on.
Good luck at Facebook, Colin! I had not heard about you making the shift until seeing this blog post.
So now that you’re on Facebook, there’s this embarrassing picture that I’m hoping you can help me make disappear… :p
I read the twits a few times still cannot believe this is true.
Congratulations and good luck, I really enjoy the time working with you.
You are a class act and a great collaborator, and fun to drink beer with too. Wishing you the best in future and hope to keep in touch.