In 1995 or 1996 I got a prophetic email from Mason Hale, who had discovered Frontier and thought it would make a wonderful environment for CGI scripting. He was right, but I came to wish I had never gotten that email. Seriously.

While it is nice to be remembered, I wish it were a little more fondly. I hate to think Dave genuinely regrets our interaction and the cool things we built together or pushed each other to build back in the early years of the web. We did some crazy stuff. Some of which has faded to history, but I still remember well — and fondly. Like when we wired Frontier up to Netscape to run client-side scripts using a custom usrtlk: protocol. It was a security nightmare waiting to happen, but it was geeky-cool and a fun and still mostly uncharted territory to explore.

So it is a bit sad for me to read that Dave associates me and that time with a negative turning point in his life. I have not kept in touch with Dave over the years. We didn’t have a falling out or anything, we just started working on different things. I am thankful for the many lessons I learned from working with Dave Winer. I wish him well, and I am sorry to hear he’s had a rough stretch these last few years.

The biggest news is that I left my job as Chief Technologist at frog design in June 2006. I left to help start up a new company, LargeSmall Systems, with another friend, Matt Cohen. We are not quite ready to publicly disclose the nature of our business or product, but it has been a great ride so far. We’ve assembled a terrific team and together we are building some really cool technology. It’s been hard work, and a lot of fun at the same time. I’ll write more about this new venture in the future.

Leaving a comfortable position at frog for the relative uncertainty of a not-quite-yet-funded hatchling startup last year was a tough decision to make. Having gone through a boom and bust during my eight years at frog, the digital technology team I founded in 1998 was doing better than ever. We were doing great work and some strategic bets we had placed earlier were starting to pay off. Yet, I had the opportunity to do something new and exciting with this start-up. I was fortunate to be able to leave frog at the top of my game, so to speak, with my department growing and with strong leadership in place behind me to keep things rolling. For me, it was a textbook case of how to leave your job on good terms.

It’s been great to watch from sidelines, since I left, and see my old team continue to crank out great work and to establish themselves as leaders in some hot emerging technology areas. One example: a frog project I played a key role in early on, the Alltel Celltop, was recently awarded Best of Show at the CTIA Wireless industry conference. Another: the new Hawaiian Airlines website is gorgeous, highly-functional, and technologically sleek and elegant. I am bursting with pride.

While I would be enjoying a bit more glory about now had I stayed at frog, I don’t have any regrets. The last nine months have been intensive training for me in the starting, funding and growing of a company. For the first time in my life I am fully focused on creating a single product. It’s been an awesome experience and the future only looks brighter.

There have been some benefits to my personal life too. For one, my commute is now just under a mile. And while at frog I was a platinum-level frequent flyer, now I am closer to home and have been able to do things like coach my daughter’s soccer team — something I never would have been able to do with my previous travel schedule. I’m still working as hard as ever, yet I’ve also been able to spend more time with my family. And that has been priceless.

More to come…

Achieving complete separation between visual design, content, and logic has long been the Holy Grail of the Web design world. By keeping these separate layers loosely-coupled, they can be developed and changed independently of one another, resulting in faster, more parallel development and more manageable code. That is the vision, but in practice, achieving truly clean separation has been easier said than done. New techniques with AJAX and CSS, and new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named “Avalon”), have made achieving the ideal of clean separation more attainable. This session dives into the experiences and lessons learned by Frog Design while using these techniques and technologies on real projects. We explore the impact (good and bad) on processes, collaboration, and efficiency.

But in the last two weeks or so, I’ve had three separate people comment on the lack of posts to my blog. Two of these were strangers I had never met before, candidates interviewing for positions (by the way: frog is hiring) who had Googled my name prior to their interview. Knowing that some people are still reading these pages gives me motivation to tidy things and update a bit more frequently. Spring break is coming up, I’ve requested a few days of vacation, and we’ve farmed all three of our kids off to visit their grand parents. Colleen and I aren’t quite sure what we’ll do with ourselves, without having to shuttle kids around to school, baseball practice and birthday parties. So with any luck, I’ll squeeze in some time to work on flowdelic.

One other thorn in my side, that has soured me a bit to the whole idea of blogging is comment spam. I’ve got comment moderation turned on, and I’ve never let a spammy comment get through, yet I still get 50 or spam comments a week here. Continually having to delete advertisements for online pharamacies and poker sites (and worse) has made this a little more of chore and a bit less of a joy than I had hoped for.