Engine Yard Alumni Grows; Bon Voyage Carlhuda

Earlier this month we celebrated the long awaited release of Rails 3. Mikel Lindsaar probably said it best when he called Rails 3 “the game changer [that] will revolutionize the web development industry”. Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche have been tirelessly driving Ruby on Rails and its community for the past 20 months. The entire Rails team really stepped up to the plate and gave us a great piece of software to continue on the Rails traditions.

Now it is time for Yehuda to broaden his horizons. After 4 years working on Rails at Engine Yard he gets to focus on another one of his passions in JQuery and mobile development - an offer he couldn’t refuse. He will be a founding employee of a new startup in the mobile applications space, with Carl joining him. They have both been passionate full-time members of the Rails team and we want to be the first to congratulate them on this new opportunity. As always we are flushed with pride on the success of our Engine Yard Alumni!

We aren’t saying goodbye to Yehuda though, he’ll remain a part of the extended Engine Yard family. Soon Engine Yard will be launching a Technical Advisory Board with Yehuda as a founding member. The Board will become a valuable forum for our customers, partners and other stakeholders to contribute feedback and perspective to the Engine Yard team to help drive the product features and capabilities. In addition to his adviser role on the new Board, Yehuda and Carl are going to continue working on Rails, beginning with the 3.1 release. We know that they’ll continue to flourish, helping to push Rails forward as one of the best web development environments.

While we’ll miss the daily presence of Yehuda and Carl, this change is well timed as we transition our focus from engineering to evangelism for Rails 3.0. We believe that Rails is the future of the web development industry and we want to ensure widespread and successful adoption of the framework. Additionally, Engine Yard will also continue to invest its Engineering talent into open source development throughout the Ruby/Rails ecosystem.

On a personal note, I’ll deeply miss having Yehuda and Carl around as coworkers. I wish them all the best and know that they’ll continue to find success in their new endeavor.