A little bit more than two years ago I was sitting on a meeting room, listening to Ruben Daniels and Rik Arends, the two founders of the company I was considering to join, Cloud9 IDE. These were two of the smartest, most inspiring people I’ve met, and they were working hard on a ground-breaking concept: a full-fledged development environment that run in the browser, and in the cloud. At the time, that sounded wildly adventurous, to say the least. But the challenges were so many, the concept so revolutionary and the people so inspiring that I joined the company two weeks after that conversation.
What followed were two exhilarating years in which we got funding, surpassed almost every technical limitation that got on our way, got a huge user base and learned (many times the hard way) about software development, startup world and companionship. Today Cloud9 IDE is by far the most advanced online IDE in the world, and what many told us that would not be possible (the DOM will never be fast enough for an editor, you won’t be able to implement real-time code analysis/refactor, developers won’t move their code to the cloud, etc.) is now a reality.
I am extremely proud to have been part of this great adventure, which has definitely made me a better developer and human being. I have no doubt that Cloud9 will continue improving and taking the development wold by storm, because they have the most talented, visionary and experienced team I’ve worked with behind.
But the time has come for me to move on. I have officially accepted a position at Telenor to work on core Firefox OS development, Mozilla’s new mobile operating system based on the open web. It is a very exciting project, and extremely different in technological challenges and userbase demographics compared to Cloud9.
Whatever the future may bring, Cloud9 will always have a special place in my heart, and I will keep using and evangelizing it on my day-to-day work.