Goodbye Oxyor, Hello Ripe

So some of you have already picked up through my various social networking feeds, but for those of you who haven't, I thought I'd say something here and offer a little more detail for the curious.

For the past few months I've been looking for a new job. Not that working at Oxyor was terrible or anything, far from it. The people I work with are friendly and good at their jobs and I feel respected most days. No, the big problem for me was the size of the development team. Most days, it was just me, with the occasional input from our designer, and for someone like me, who learns from working with others, this hasn't done much for my skillset, and by extension, my career.

And so, I started looking, taking the opportunity to be picky and find a company that suits my skills and interests and can offer me the kinds of opportunities I want for my career. After months of searching and interviewing with some really great companies (and some grossly unprofessional ones), I found Ripe NCC.

Ripe is a non-profit corporation that, for lack of a more technical term, handles the nuts and bolts of the internet. They handle IP registration (organising who is and isn't allowed to use what address online) and they develop tools for their clients to aid in network diagnostics around the globe. I'll be working on a project they call RipeAtlas, which uses many of the technologies I've been tinkering with in my free time, like GeoDjango and Embedded Linux. I'll also be working with RipeStat, a high-traffic statatistics capturing and rendering system. It may not sound very interesting to most people, but believe me when I tell you that it's pretty damn cool for me.

Ripe is a much larger company, with a good sized team of developers for both projects. There's lots of stuff for me to learn there, so I'm pretty stoked to get started. My first day is August 1st.

Until then, I'll be helping to shore up my work at Oxyor and stabilise the project to a place where I can confidently walk away and know there won't be too much trouble for their end. I'll probably be doing occasional contract work with them for a few months to assist in the transition, and I'm told that they're already looking into finding a replacement. There's also going to be a lot of fun documentation to write, and probably lots of repeat explanations of how things work. They'll be fine though, I'm not worried.

So that's it. Yay for new job!