I'm Leaving Beaker!

I’m leaving Beaker! You might be expecting this post to expose a controversy or detail complaints about working on the project, but there is no controversy, and the complaints I do have will be familiar to anyone who’s formed a company or maintained an open-source project.

I’m leaving Beaker because I want to be a full-time developer. I was a developer on Beaker—I built Beaker’s internal interfaces, beakerbrowser.com, and a dozen or so websites and apps that demonstrated Beaker’s peer-to-peer APIs—but I was a part-time developer.

I was a founder, designer, copywriter, and evangelist too. A significant chunk of my time was spent designing things like the Beaker website or Beaker’s editor, writing documentation and READMEs, preparing presentations about Beaker, and doing whatever else the project needed to move forward. My work was starting to look a lot more like the work of a developer advocate (and I’m proud of that work!), but it’s just not the kind of work I want to keep doing.

I want to be a full-time developer, but Beaker needs me as a full-time developer advocate, so it’s time for something new.

What’s Next?

Beaker is doing great and will carry on just fine without me. We recently raised a modest investment round that will allow us to keep working on Beaker and to test its long-term sustainability, and to even hire a person or two (whoa). I hold a significant stake in the company that houses Beaker and I’ll remain a voting member of the board, so I’ll still be able to keep Paul and Mathias in check :-)

As for me, I’m not sure yet what I’ll do next. It’ll most certainly involve being a developer on a team that builds stuff on the Web, but I’m still deciding where I think I’ll fit best. Feel free to email or DM me if you’ve got any ideas!