It’s been a wonderful 12+ years in the Bay Area, but as of July 1st Des, Devin and I are packing up our East Bay house and renting it out, and moving down to Santa Barbara county. Carpinteria in particular, and to a new job at Lynda.com as their developer content marketing manager. My last day at Adobe is June 28th. I’m really going to miss Adobe- and all the wonderful friends and colleagues I’ve made during my oddly-erratic 12 years there (including the Macromedia years).

In some ways it’s not the choice many would have expected- bad time to sell a house, tons of jobs flowing through the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, HTML has never been more pervasive and full of promise than it is today for someone of my background.  The easy path would be to stick with my job and the amazing Dreamweaver team and keep cranking out the hits, or hang out around the Bay as a free agent jumping from startup to startup making a pile of cash but with little personal time to enjoy it.  The decision was a tricky one for me, and my family/quality of life factored in more heavily than ever before.

It really came down to the need for change.  To shed the old skin I’ve been in for the last 12+ years and reinvent my career with a family I adore, in a town we both love, working on a set of challenges I’ve always wanted to, and the right balance of my time to enjoy both.  I’ve been working around and with the same company, products and technology for over a decade and despite the maturity that sustained focus can bring, it also has it’s drawbacks. Whenever you view the same problems through the same lens for so long you run the risk of becoming complacent. Predictable. And I don’t care for either of those traits, honestly. Although I love the Web like an old friend, I’ve slowly come to realize that I needed to do something else entirely.  I love Dreamweaver (and Adobe) like crazy and can’t help feel an almost paternal separation anxiety leaving them after so long at the helm, but it’s time for both of us to fly free.

So here we are.

My managers and closest colleagues are all who’ve known so far, and have been working with me to transition the multi-million dollar business of Dreamweaver, Inc. out of my hands in the next 10 days or so.  I’ve been dreading the infamous ‘Goodbye Email’ to my broader team and colleagues, but that will go out today as well.  Followed by a rush of exit paperwork, legal documents and the like as the door whooshes shut behind me at Adobe’s SF offices and a new rush of realtors, moving vans, renter screening, school hunting, and general busywork required to move a family and 12 years worth of their collected junk 6 hours south so I can hit the ground running on July 23rd, my first day at the Lynda.com offices.

I’ll admit in some ways I’m nervous as hell undertaking such a huge change, but mostly I’m just looking forward to a complete change of environment and challenge, and to work at a company 100% focused on educating and enriching people’s lives and careers in Lynda.com.  A privately-held company without shareholder pressure to elevate the stock price quarterly, serving customers with problems that I can help solve with a team that’s sitting in the same room as me and not a distant voice across a Skype or VoIP bridge. And those customers are largely the same ones I’ve been building tools for the last decade or so, old friends who I’ve only been able to help by building better hammers, not elevating the craft of what they do, of who they are.  It’s time for me to focus on that for a while.

And that’s exciting as hell.