Friday will be the 14th anniversary of my first tweet. Umm... it hasn't aged well. The Internet was stunned by the revelation that I was reading my email.

Reading email and messing around with Eclipse 3.3M5.

— Brian Duff (@brianduff) March 5, 2007

In more contemporary news, this week I joined Twitter as a Principal Engineer in Engineering Effectiveness.

I'll try to build things that help engineers inside Twitter have a lovely, productive time creating the cool things that they make every day. Delighting developers is something that I've continued to be passionate about across Oracle, Google, and Facebook. I'm really excited to make the jump from being a long time user of Twitter to being part of the Twitter team. It's pretty cool that I get to continue to work on stuff that I enjoy so much. Onboarding remotely is a... weird... experience, but so far I'm having a whale of a time (geddit? gurgle).

I do leave Facebook with a great amount of sadness and fond remembrance. Whatever you may think about it (or any of the tech companies, frankly) from a societal and moral perspective, the experience of being an engineer at these companies is truly awe inspiring, humbling, and transformative (and frankly, fun). I was lucky to learn and grow with an exceptional set of talented and passionate people. I got to work on some challenging and fascinating projects. Most of all, I experienced a tremendous amount of support and care from people I worked with at every level as we went through the tummult and disconnection of working from home and adjusting to how that impacted just about everything in strange and unexpected ways.

This is only the fourth company I've worked for in (a quite shocking and hard to believe) 23 years in the software industry, 16 of those years living in Silicon Valley. Seeing huge change in the perception of the tech industry, watching cozy little startups transform into big hulking tech, and noticing the general perception of the Bay Area as a whole shift significantly, I still feel a sense of delighted disbelief about where I am. This wee man from a working class family in Leith somehow made it to be the first person in the family to finish six years of secondary school, make it to university, and then crazily make it all the way to this lucky life in a distant country doing what I'm passionate about for a living for most of my adult life. I've worked hard, but I think I've also been very very lucky, and it's part of my fiber that I will always do whatever I can to help others who need a bit of that luck too, whatever background they're from.

So pumped and ready to get started on chapter 4 :)