Locating The Next Role; The Yahoo! Years
Looking back at my career over the last 20 or so years, it's immediately apparent that it's always been a bit geo. Geophysical seismic survey processing for natural resources (OK, mostly for oil and gas) for Digicon ... geo. Setting up operations for ERS-1, the European Space Agency's first remote sensing synthetic aperture radar satellite ... geo and rocket science. Short wave radio frequency planning to enable the BBC World Service to get transmissions into countries who would much prefer the BBC didn't broadcast there ... geo. Deploying the first geo-targeted ad system and rolling out a global place based view of the world internally and to the external developer community for Yahoo! ... totally geo. Granted, there were other roles which had no geo context whatsoever but I always seem to keep coming back to this vague and nebulous mixture of place, location, maps and geography that we term geo.
Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let's round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn't really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it's time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.
