I’m making some big changes, both professionally and personally, that I’m very excited about. First, I’m shutting down Metaversant at the end of this month. I started the company a little over 12 years ago and I’m sad to see it go, but it is time for new challenges and opportunities.

It was exhilerating striking out on my own. I started with nothing but a laptop, a passion for technology, and a reputation for doing great work, and I created a profitable business delivering solutions for well-known organizations like NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southwest Airlines, Red Hat Software, and Duke University.

But I’m also proud of the work I did for lesser-known clients, many of whom were active customers for six or seven years. Sure, I had a few “transactional” engagements here and there, but for several organizations I became a trusted advisor and developer for all kinds of technical endeavors for multiple years.

Many of you know me as an “Alfresco guy” and I’ve certainly benefitted tremendously from the deep knowledge I developed around that platform and from the wonderful people in the Alfresco community that I helped foster and grow. I wouldn’t trade those experiences or the relationships I built with people in all parts of the world for anything.

At the same time, some of my most exciting, rewarding, and impactful projects have been in other areas of content management and custom application development. Projects where code is just flying from my fingertips while I’m in the zone, or projects with many different systems working together in the cloud, or projects built collaboratively with talented teammates delivering solutions with millions of users. Those projects get me out of bed in the morning.

I’m someone that needs constant challenges and a lot of variety in what those challenges consist of. While starting my own company was a life-long dream, the kinds of projects that find me aren’t as exciting as they used to be. Yes, I could stop taking certain kinds of projects and put more effort behind marketing and business development for the projects I’m interested in. Or I could join a team that is awash in projects like that. I chose the latter. At the end of the month I’ll be joining Apple as a Principal Architect working in the Content Management Systems Center of Excellence.

As you can imagine, Apple has all sorts of content management challenges. A lot of those revolve around music and video so that appeals to me a lot. Regardless of the type of digital experiences their CMS technologies support, doing so at “Apple scale” really excites me.

As part of the new gig, Christy and I are moving to Austin. With its thriving live music scene it’s always been my kind of town, but as it has continued to grow as a tech hub it really became impossible to resist. And, I already have a fairly serious breakfast taco habit, so that’s one thing that won’t have to change with the relocation.

The geography change is kind of like the job change–we’ve lived in the same area for thirty years and it is definitely time to shake it up, especially with a mostly-empty nest. Staying in Texas wouldn’t necessarily be our first choice, but we both love Austin and it is close enough to Dallas that we’ll be able to visit friends and family quite frequently.

I want to thank all of the customers I’ve served over the years. We did some really great work together and we had a lot of fun doing it. I also want to thank everyone in the Alfresco community for reading and sharing my writing and my code, for sharing your knowledge and insights with me, and for encouraging me to keep going. How boring it must be for the unlucky ones who spend their days implementing solutions on platforms that don’t have such an amazing group of friends and colleagues scattered around the globe, collaborating with each other for the benefit of all.