My New Role At Adobe

March 2, 2006 · 10 Comments

If you've been following my blog, you'll have seen that I have recently been in the process of changing roles at Adobe. My role has been somewhat fluid since the middle of last year in fact and I've worked with a number of teams since then in a somewhat unofficial capacity (for example: helping with QA on the ActionScript 3 compiler / VM, project managing CFEclipse - and a number of other things that I can't talk about... maybe some day!). Since the acquisition closed, I've been looking at a variety of new roles here and I recently accepted one that I officially started yesterday. I am now part of Adobe's Hosted Services group. I'm a "Senior Computer Scientist" now (finally my grey hairs count for something) and will be continuing my architecture focus, likely in a much more hands on manner. So what does the Hosted Services group do? Well, we "own" Breeze ASP (hosted) and a variety of PDF services, including Create Adobe PDF Online. My role will focus on the software infrastructure behind the services. It's a very interesting space to be in as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is gaining increasing traction across the industry. I won't be able to talk about what we have planned for the future (for obvious reasons) but I expect to be talking about a broader range of Adobe products and services over time. It will mean that I won't be as active in the ColdFusion community as I have been in recent years - fewer user group talks and much less involvement in most mailing lists - but I intend to remain very active with Model-Glue, ColdSpring, Reactor and CFEclipse - as well as continuing to work on Fusebox 5! I hope you'll all keep reading, despite the slight change of focus here!

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Tags: adobe · coldfusion · connect · personal · saas

10 responses so far ↓

1 ntunney // Mar 2, 2006 at 6:20 PM

Congrats Sean. Glad to feel you have an official home. Did you ever think you would have scientist in your title?

Awesome.
2 Ryan Stewart // Mar 2, 2006 at 6:28 PM

Huge congratulations. That's going to be a very sweet place to be in the next couple of years. Hopefully we'll see some exciting stuff from you!
3 darron // Mar 2, 2006 at 6:40 PM

Hey Sean, that's great - congrats on the new position and best of luck going forward.
4 Tom Loyd // Mar 2, 2006 at 6:59 PM

Well Sean, we can't fire so I guess we'll keep on reading here. Anyway, congrats on the position and look forward to hearing wonderful things coming out of Adobe now that they have you, the master, on board!
Semper Gumbi!
Tom
5 tony of the weeg clan // Mar 2, 2006 at 7:00 PM

congrats man. we will miss your valuable input in the cf world, thats for sure.

good luck and godspeed.
6 Mike Brunt // Mar 2, 2006 at 8:19 PM

Sean as I passed from Allaire to Macromedia as a field-based employee, I saw at the sharp-end the reaction of ColdFusion users and the apprehension that the acquisition of Allaire caused. I really think your attention to the concerns of those users, one way or another, was a huge factor in ensuring the ongoing success of ColdFusion. I saw that and heard it. I hope we will not lose touch; thank you for your ongoing dedication and not forgetting the marvelous coding guidelines you released.
7 Stephen Cassady // Mar 2, 2006 at 10:46 PM

Awesome:
"My role will focus on the software infrastructure behind the services."

I assume that means we have somebody on the backend, where Adobe consumes their own chow, going (a) everything needs to run Cold Fusion (b) why cann't Cold Fusion do this for the hosted services we run, I'm going to go talk to X at the CF development team and get that implemented and (c) Adobe! we need frameworks here (you are a little framework gun-ho) :-)

Not Awesome:
"I won't be as active in the ColdFusion community as I have been in recent years"

Mostly because I'm selfish. But, given the thought I have above, I'm pretty sure we now have a very very capable person running Adobe webservices, with their own product, who will be able to tell the CF Dev team - "Hey! Implement this now! Every moment means less revenue for Adobe, and longer to market for our community of developers! And don't mess with me man, I know my code-fu!"
:-) :-) :-) ;-)
8 Brandon Harper // Mar 2, 2006 at 10:47 PM

The ColdFusion community (and even the server product/language itself) would not be what it is today if you'd hadn't engaged and challenged a lot of us to learn more about OO, frameworks, good development practices, etc. over the past several years. Truly a big loss for the community in some respects as you've been a great, humble but very knowledgable mentor for many of us, myself included of course.

Best of luck in your new role which sounds like it will be a new, fun and exciting challenge, and I'm sure many of us have our fingers crossed that ColdFusion will remain a personal interest for you for some time to come as your involvement has been very crucial in moving things forward.
9 Damien // Mar 3, 2006 at 6:30 AM

Given what you did at the helm (architecturally speaking) at Macromedia's web team, I look forward to what you turn the Adobe services team into. Good luck with it!
10 John // Mar 4, 2006 at 5:38 AM

Congrats Sean!
Thanks for all the help that you have given me, I can't tell you how much it means to me:)

Best of luck with your new postion.
John

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