2009 is shaping up to be very interesting for me. As noted today on the MooTools blog, I’m taking on the mantle of the mootools-more principal developer. I’ve spent the last week or two porting a healthy chunk of the Clientcide libraries over to MooTools (which mostly just means going over them and refining and cleaning them up and renaming a few things so they fit in better).

The first infusion of my plugins should be ready for -more in the next week for testing and I’m excited to see them make their way into the framework. For starters we’re going to bring items into -more that do not require non-js assets to work well (so Waiter is out for now, for instance). There will be a roadmap coming soon that should give you an idea of where -more is going. We hope to see a lot of contributors involved.

Wait, I said Job*s*

But wait! That’s not all! Today is my first day at my new shiny job. I’m quite happy and excited to say that I am now amongst the employed again. Over the past 15 months since I left CNET to pursue my own idea of fun I’ve been approached by numerous companies to join their ranks. The latest company to put the full court press on me and convinced me that they were the right next step for me to take: Cloudera.

Allow me to elaborate. Aside from the fact that the team here is beyond killer and that the people backing this small upstart are impressive, the place has two things that are really enticing to me. But first, you must be asking yourself, what does this company do?

Cloudera is to Hadoop what RedHat is to Linux. We are a service oriented company around an open source product – Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce/GFS, which is basically what Google uses to crunch the whole internet into a format that allows it to return blazing fast search results to you when you type in your search for “JavaScript rockstar” (which I see is the term that brought you to this page).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. For a guy who has founded a music startup, launched a music site for CNET, and then launched a social aggregator startup, why is this the right place for him to be? Well, I alluded to two big reasons earlier. They are:

1. I believe that Hadoop (and Cloudera specifically) are going to have a big impact on technology and, specifically the web. Start-ups like Iminta.com aggregate a mountain of data and the interesting products of tomorrow are going to do interesting things with mountains of data. Simply put, what Amazon’s hosted services have done for startups who need a host, I think Cloudera will do for startups that need to crunch all that web 2.0 data that we are all creating with every comment, tag, and upload.
2. The second big thing is that the Cloudera team is small, smart and motivated. More importantly (for me) they recognize the value of a solid user experience and they needed someone who had my exact skill set. It’s rare that an opportunity comes along that lets me be a product manager, UI designer, and UI developer all at the same time. I like doing these things and, most importantly, am most happy when I get to do all of them together. The job is just a great fit for me.

But What About You and Moo?

One of the cool things about this gig is that I’m going to have time to continue doing what I’ve been doing. I’m still working on the next version of the MooTools book. I’m now the principal developer for mootools-more and that’ll take up some time, too. I’ll keep blogging about MooTools and JavaScript. If anything, the demands of this new roll will likely mean I’ll have more and more code to release.

I’m really excited about my new jobs and I’m really excited about MooTools. This year is gonna rock.