Changing places

Friday 24 December was my last day at Yandex' Moscow office. As many already know Alena and I have moved to Seattle. She's went to work for Bing and I've got an offer from Yandex to keep working for it as an external consultant which I gladly accepted.

Before

My main job at Yandex was managing a group of developers working on many different projects but all sharing one technological platform: we create web services using Python. Another, also important, part of my job was maintaining and developing a stack of Python-related technologies: Django, various tools, build process, documentation. And I have to admit that this latter part was always sacrificed in favor of the former.

After

Changing place of residence means that I will no longer be able to do any personal management. And that additional load just becomes my main job. Which, by the way, I like very much. Django-related stuff at Yandex needs some tidying up. I'd like to bringing it up to modern standards, automate routine infrastructure tasks of deployment, testing, monitoring…

One other thing that I don't want to give up is various APIs to Yandex services. None of them has become a hit yet but I have a couple of ideas on how to fix it. Documentation, feature extension, creating of exemplary apps demonstrating APIs best parts — all this is much needed.

Blogging

I hope that now I'll have more time for technical blogging. Doing it at an office open space was absolutely impossible, I was mostly exhausted after-hours and weekends are full of house work. This has lead to many interesting things sitting for years as drafts, acquiring dust. Though it might be just because of my laziness. Let's see who will win this time :-).

While I'm at it here's another thing. My friends keep poking me about writing something generally life-related. Doing it here would be weird so I'm trying to pick up some sane way of doing it. I will be writing some text, linking pictures from my photo hosting and I'd like to be able to forward there my content from other places. Current options are:

• Facebook. It looks like it's made exactly for this and about "everyone" is now on it. What stops me is unwillingness to put a pretty large part of my life into hands of its founder who seems to think that he knows better on how everyone else should live. Besides the very idea of a "single social network for everyone" is flawed so I don't have a goal to collect all my friends on Facebook.

• Twitter. I tweet and I'll keep doing it. However it's just not the right format for life notes that I'm about to do.

• Tumblr. It's a completely dark horse to me right now. It kind of fits the "Twitter, but bigger" description but I don't know if it can actually live up to my needs.

Any advice?