So long and thanks for all the fish

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Skype

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Thanks for all the well wishes, it’s true, the London part of Skype SDP has been phased out, so myself, Caitlin and Paul are no longer Skype employees. Obviously I am not going to say too much about it. Of course I am disappointed with what has happened. Skype technology is really cool and SDP were making a difference to our develop community.

 

For example a year ago our developers were getting around 1000 downloads a month, after we introduced the extras manager that figure went up to just under a million downloads a month. A pretty significant increase by anyone standard. I was just in the process of getting a new extras manager redesigned to make it even easier for users to find applications and much more compiling, as well as getting better exposure for extras in the client. I also just retuned from Asia working with one of our partners so we could publish extras to more places. I just hope that the focus on extras continues and Skype continues to support the developer community.

 

While its sad to leave, I have been around with developer programs for long enough to know that re-orgs happen, sometimes the guy sitting next to you goes, you come into the office only to find your friends and colleagues have gone, and sometimes its you.

 

I remember my first day at Skype back in our old office, we were so small in those days that I had to work out the kitchen a few times as there were no desks free. After spending 10 years at Microsoft joining Skype was an eye opener. It gave me lots of exposure to non Microsoft products (I now use Firefox as standard) and a new way of thinking. At Microsoft I had the mentality that Windows was the best, Microsoft make the best software and users will always upgrade to the latest version. You can imagine how long I believed that after joining a company full of Linux users, and a company that gives away its software for free. So all in all the last 2 years I have leaned a lot about the real world.

 

Now of course I have to turn my head to the future, I haven’t decided what I am going to do yet, being this close to Christmas does limit your options and opportunities to become involved with developer programs are few and far between, so I need to spend a few days evaluating my options.

 

Incidentally, after my brush with the open man hole in Tallinn on Wednesday, my leg became infected. When I got home on Friday night I ended up in casualty having the cut cleaned, a series of injections and a couple of stitches to boot. It hurts like hell.

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