This post has been a long time coming, but a few weeks ago I decided to take a job with Adobe working in the Omniture Business Unit.  It was a pretty difficult decision (I really love Rain!), but in the end I felt that joining Adobe was the best move for me and my family.  My job here will be to help bring Flex and AIR technologies to SiteCatalyst and other products within the Omniture Suite.  I’ll also be spending a little more time in PHP and traditional front end web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS).

My biggest fear in leaving Rain was that I would miss out on some of the great aspects of agency-life:  lots of new and varying projects.  I had many opportunities to lead high-profile projects doing cutting edge work to help our clients stay ahead of the curve.  Besides Flex and AIR, I also got to build mobile applications on iOS and Android.   My two favorite projects were Playground Sessions (soon to be in a closed Alpha release) and PianoMarvel (both AIR desktop applications that teach people how to play piano).  Rain is currently positioned as a developer-heavy digital agency and prides themselves on being able to do all the crazy awesome technically complex projects that other more traditional agencies don’t have the chops for.  Needless to say I learned a lot working there.

One of the things that gets me excited about working for Adobe is that I’m going to have similar experiences here.  There are a lot of great ideas that have been brewing for a long time and I’ll get to be the catalyst to see them through with my unique experience.  I say unique because at this time Aaron Hardy (great buddy at Rain who joined Adobe at around the same time I did) and myself are really the only experienced Flex/AIR developers in the entire Omniture business unit of Adobe.  Plus, ever since I began learning Flex, I have begun to develop an affinity for Adobe and their products.  It has always been one of my goals to work for Adobe for many years now because I love the company and the community.  Now I’m excited to play a much more central role in it!