After six and a half years I’ve decided to leave Google. I’ve had a great time, met a tonne of amazing people, and learned a lot. But I have decided it’s time to move on, try something a bit different, and expose myself to different challenges.

Over the years I worked on features such as Gmail Chat, helped start the massive undertaking that was the Gmail frontend rewrite, and integrated gadgets into Gmail. Most of my work, though, could be classed as “infrastructural”; helping to keep Gmail development ticking and making the battle-hardened components available to other teams at Google.

In parallel, I co-founded The Closure Library with Erik and saw it grow from a small 20% project to become the de facto JS library at Google, receiving contributions from hundreds of engineers across dozens of projects. It was eventually open sourced in 2009 and now has an awesome team working on it fulltime.

My work on infrastructure meant moving onto Google+ was a logical progression, where I have worked for the last 18-months as tech-lead of the excellent group of guys who make up the Frontend Infrastructure Team.

But, what’s next?

I’m still interested in what can be achieved by throwing together some computer-codez and by the possibilities afforded by the web. I think we’re living in really interesting times and there are many companies doing amazing things.

Ultimately I was most excited at the opportunity to work somewhere that was still small, has a great team, and has lofty goals. The choice then was Obvious.