I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens. (more…)

We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” - the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different - as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr. (more…)