Morrie the Toupee Salesman

My current job is pretty challenging, running the Labs group at Travelpod. Managing experienced and generally hyper-intelligent developers, is tough, everyone has their opinion not only on technical decisions but on management decisions (lets face it, on EVERY decision), and its a tough balance to allow everyone to express their opinion, feel that they are heard, and still take responsibility and make the hard calls necessary to move forward. In general I want everyone to perform and grow as individuals both inside and outside of the “office” (some of our people aren’t actually in the office). So it’s cool when I can point to an employee whose career is growing completely independent of our particular small focus. Eli White, who worked with me at digg (engineer #3), and who I flat out admire as a programmer, is one such individual, and its great to see that he’s been invited to a Microsoft Summit on PHP to be held in Redmond in November. Congrats Eli!