Goodbye Sencha (& Hello remind101)

Today was my last day at Sencha. On May 6th, I’ll be joining a very small startup in the education technology space called remind101 (remind101.com). I’ve wanted for a long time to go to a social-forward enterprise, and Remind101 was exactly that and thus I made the tough call to say goodbye. More on that in a second.

It’s been an awesome ride with a ton of excitement, launches, new products, events, community, customers, and more. I’m very excited about the future of Sencha, and the future of the frameworks and tools. For me, the opportunity to go to remind101 was so compelling that I decided to make the move.

I remember very fondly (and very stressfully) some of my favorite times at Sencha: defining our next generation products, putting on SenchaCon 2011 (the keynote, oy!), getting Ext JS 4.0 out the door, getting Architect 2.o out the door, shipping Animator 1.0 at Adobe’s MAX conference, flying 150k+ (actual, no bonus) miles in one year around the world presenting Sencha at conferences and perhaps the best part: doing a ton of writing. Being a part of the outbound face of Sencha was amazing, writing a lot of the blog, the website and the material that we used internally to move the ball forward. That, and all the thousand things I can’t remember, but loved doing.

For the folks at Sencha, I wish them all the best luck in the world. I’m rooting for you all, wishing you all the success in the world. I enjoyed so thoroughly working with you and the community that I look forward to our paths crossing again soon.

My new role is at a small company called remind101, a safe platform for parents, students and teachers to communicate. I’m still getting the public pitch down, but what got me really excited was the momentum they have and they vision the company has to help teachers. I’ve wanted to do something “that mattered” (in the social sense) for a long time and I’m excited about joining remind101 to help people. Expect me to be writing more here and on Twitter.

Thoughts on Adobe Camp Brasil

I presented earlier today at Adobe Camp Brasil, in the city of Maceió in north-eastern Brasil. It’s a wonderful city, beach-side, with blue skies, low humidity and moderate high-80s weather. The conference has a definite Adobe-tint to it, but this year was replete with HTML5 activity with most of the sessions being about HTML5, and the Flash sessions about gaming.

My talk (slides) was about mobile HTML5, Sencha fundamentals, and Sencha Touch + Sencha Architect. It’s the first time I’ve ever presented through a simultaneous translator, where I spoke in English and the audience wore headsets. When they had a question, they’d ask in Portuguese, and I’d listen on a headset and speak back in English. It felt very UN-esque. It’s clear in this community people are looking for solutions to move on to web-standards based solutions, and Sencha and others have great offers to help. Also of note was while the conference was largely Brasilans, there was a sizable representation from places like Peru and Chile, which I think goes to show the enthusiam of the LATAM developer market.

Lastly, shout out to Demian Borba and his family. They’ve organized the event over the last few years. It’s my first time attending, but many of the Adobe folks I know here have been coming for a while and I think they’d all agree that it’s very well put together and I’m looking forward to hopefully participating again next year.

Sencha Architect 2

The very first thing my boss at Sencha asked me to work on when I joined was: “figure out what we’re doing with Designer”. Having known nothing then and only a skeleton team we started to sketch out what would become Sencha Architect 2. That was a year ago, and thankfully we’ve been lucky enough to be joined at Sencha by a great team from engineering, to product management, to UX that made Sencha Architect 2 happen. It’s crazy to look back to see in the last year all the amazing products we’ve released, such as Sencha Touch 2, the preview of Sencha.io, and now Architect 2. It’s such a huge step forward for us and for the web. I’ve been on the road demoing it at conferences and people go crazy when you see how easy it is to build an HTML5 app, which is a testament the work the team has put in to make the product easy and productive to use.

Thoughts on India Software Developer Conference

I landed in Bangalore at about 130am this morning, and later in the morning I presented Sencha Designer 2 at the India Software Developer Conference in Bangalore. Hosted by the magazine Silicon India, it’s the 5th or 6th time they’ve had this conference and the attendance at the show was over 600 people. It’s a weekend show so I was pretty surprised by the attendance. Comically while I was presenting, my laptop once fell off the podium in a huge thud and the lapel mic cut out on me a handful of times.

I attended the “Development” track, and from my vantage, the event was mostly focused around more enterprise software development, with a lot of speakers talking about Java and about cloud solutions. While a lot of the stuff around Java EE and that sort of stuff was largely lost on me, there were a few interesting sessions on the cloud side. I’d never seen much about Windows Azure and one of the sessions was an Azure 101. Looks like it has some very cool features that are very different than AWS or GAE. If I had an app to deploy, it would be interesting to check out. There was one feature it had which was a “migrate SQL” tool to migrate your installed Microsoft on-prem SQL Server instance to the cloud. I can’t imagine how hard that feature would be to build. Very impressive.

I’m in Bangalore until tomorrow evening, then off the Pune for a few days then back to San Francisco by mid-week.

Thoughts from QCon London 2012

I’m sitting at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center at QCon London 2012. I just finished presenting “Building HTML5 Apps in Days, Not Weeks”, which was an overview of how to build apps using Sencha Designer 2 Beta, and also how to leverage HTML5 to build cross platform apps. Room was fully seated and people had a lot of questions — so, good signs all around.

Thus far it’s been a great two days here at the event. From what I understand it’s twice as busy as it was last year, and has sold out with over 1000 registered attendees. The attendees seem to be from a lot of smaller dev agencies across Europe which is great since they’re often looking for solutions for projects they’re working on. Tonight, I’ll also be speaking at the .NET User Group meeting, talking about HTML5 and Sencha, then tomorrow afternoon I’m participating in a roundtable discussion on outsourcing (nothing to do with HTML5 or the web — just a general product development conversation). I’m looking forward to the next day and a half here in London.

I’m in Europe until mid-next week, sticking around through the weekend to do some customer meetings next week in Paris. I did manage to sneak out of the event for a few hours to see the Churchill War Cabinet rooms (very cool) and do a little shopping on Jermyn Street. Looking forward to spending the weekend in London and Paris and meeting up with friends.

Thoughts on SenchaCon 2011

I’m back at home after an exciting time at SenchaCon 2011, in Austin, Texas. What an event. A great bonding experience for the company, and an even better opportunity for us to spend time with customers and the community. I don’t blog often enough about Sencha, but this was so much fun and so exciting that I had to toss out a few things that were my favorite from the show:

The Sencha Platform: we articulated our platform for the web using Sencha technologies. Built on tools, frameworks and the cloud the Platform gives developers all they need to get up and running building world class web apps. So stoked about building out the Platform over the next year.
Sencha.io, Ext JS 4.1, Sencha Touch 2, and Designer 2. Awesome launches for all of our products. Congrats to the teams for making it happen.
Multi-device, Shared, and Enriched: our vision on how the future is going to shape web apps and content in general. Abe did a fantastic job articulating how the web will evolve over the next few years.
BBQ at Stubbs! So much fun hanging out and have a drink with folks from the community, and an awesome live performance by Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. They’ll be at the Fillmore next month if you want to catch them in San Francisco.
Hackaton! I’m always amazed at what people can put together at a hackathon, and I’ll brag just a bit: the teams at our hackaton produced some of the best apps I’ve ever seen at a one-day hackathon. Hats off to the community for kicking ass hacking on our products.

SenchaCon was easily one of the best tech conferences I’ve been to, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. Now, time to sleep for the next few days. Can’t wait for SourceDevCon in London next year — hope to see you there if you didn’t make it to SenchaCon Austin.

Presentation from Source Dev Con

I’ve uploaded my presentation from Sourc{ Dev Con last week, where I previewed Sencha.io, our new set of cloud services. They’re also available on SlideShare if you want to browse them directly online.

Hello Sencha (& Goodbye Adobe)

This month I started a new job at Sencha, a small Silicon Valley startup that builds frameworks, tools, and services for the next web. I’m super-excited to join Sencha and to be working in a startup. Sencha has some killer frameworks (like Ext JS, Ext GWT and Sencha Touch) that make building amazing web content and web apps a breeze. The kinds of stuff you can do in the web with HTML and next generation browsers is truly stunning. I’ll be running the product management team, helping define, guide and take to market all of our products. Very exciting stuff.

Adobe’s been the smallest company I’ve worked for and I’ve always wanted to work in a real Valley startup. This was an amazing opportunity that crossed my path so I made the jump and I’ve said goodbye and thanks to Adobe. I look back at my years at Adobe very fondly — there are great people, products and customers there and I was sad to say goodbye to all my friends there. Doing a startup that I believe in made sense for me, so it’s a fond farewell to Adobe and to the Flash/AIR community. I’m super proud of the work we did shipping AIR for iPhone (aka Notus), AIR for TV (aka Stagecraft), the Mobile Distribution Service (aka Outbreak), and all the other projects, teams and efforts that continue to kick-ass.

Here’s to the next adventure! (and yes, we’re hiring!)