It’s time for a change, and more of the same.

Starting next week, I will be joining the Runscope team.  Runscope provides tools that help developers debug, test and monitor Web APIs.  This is a company that lives and breathes HTTP.  If you know me, I’m sure you understand why that appeals to me.

Although I have been building distributed business applications for more than 20 years, it wasn’t until 2006 when I started to begin to really appreciate the power of HTTP and discover the REST constraints.  That appreciation and discovery continues.  There is not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new about how people use and abuse HTTP.  My regular visits to StackOverflow, conversations on Twitter and a healthy dose of mailing list subscriptions guarantee there is no shortage of new material.

It appears that I have become addicted to trying to help people solve their problems and fortuitously for all, Runscope have offered me the opportunity to do that full time.  I plan to be the carbon-based Runscope service providing guidance, in all shapes and sizes, to the developer community on how to get the most out of HTTP.

I recently visited the Runscope offices in San Francisco and got to meet all of the team.  There is a fabulous atmosphere is the office and I am somewhat sad that I will be working remotely from my home office in Montreal.

I’ve known John Sheehan, digitally for what seems like a lifetime in internet years, but this was the first time we had met in person.   I’ve always admired John’s enthusiasm and ability to get stuff done.  There have been many occasions when, I have heard John in my head saying “Less talk, more code”.  It’s easy to get lost in architectural debates and forget about actually delivering tangible value.

My visit to Runscope convinced me it was a company I wanted to be a part of.  John and Frank have brought together a team of experienced developers who genuinely care about the product they are building.

Once you have used the Runscope tooling, you will see it is a high quality service that addresses a very real need for today’s API developers.  What you don’t see is the infrastructure that exists behind that tooling.  This is one case where you really do want to see how the sausage is made, because the same care has been put into deployment, monitoring, analysis, reliability and development as you see on the public facing service.  

This is a service that has been built to evolve and I am very excited to be a part of it.  If it sounds like something you might also want to be a part of, we’re hiring.