Upon returning recently from a relaxing two-week holiday in Italy with my family, I found myself looking at an opportunity to join Chad Dickerson’s Yahoo! Developer Network team as a Product Manager. What a nice way to re-enter the real world after a break.

With a clutter-free mind, it took me about 2 seconds to figure out that this was my chance to do many of the things at Yahoo! that I’ve wanted to do since joining the company last year. And the chance to work closely with Chad again was a huge incentive.

He and his boss Bradley Horowitz have opened up several innovative and very successful paths for Yahoo! including the new open Hack Day. Watching the excitement around that event build, it’s obvious that there’s a lot more that can happen there. I’ll also get to work more closely with Jeremy Zawodny who has been a key evangelist and one of the most important voices for the company.

The idea of Yahoo! technologies opening up as services is picking up a lot of momentum. It’s an important opportunity that we have to get right, and we’re getting more organized to keep up with demand. We also have to listen more carefully to what people want from us. YDN is a great way to catalyze discussions amongst developers using Yahoo! services and to open up broader dialog with Yahoo! teams.

I’ve already started digging into the data that’s available, and it’s obvious that Yahoo! Developer Network is on a serious growth path. Site traffic is rising. The blog is buzzing. API keys are flying out the door. And more and more Yahoo! APIs are getting released and at increasing speed.

It’s a fascinating time to be here, and I hope I can help the company both reach and push its potential in this new role. Thanks, Chad.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 9:38 am and is filed under yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.