Even as Yahoo loses execs by the dozens, they continue to hire new blood. Blaine Cook, the controversial (and some say very talented) former chief architect at Twitter, is now a rails developer at Yahoo. A source at Yahoo confirms the hire and says he’s working on the Fire Eagle project in Yahoo’s Brickhouse early stage product group, which is run by Chad Dickerson.
FireEagle, which we’ve described as a “Twitter for location” was first announced in November 2007 and is currently in private beta.
At the time he left Twitter Cook said he was “moving to the UK so that my partner can pursue her career.” Plans change, I guess.
Shortly after he left Twitter, Blaine joined the Gillmor Gang to talk about his experience there.
does this mean we can expect Yahoo to have constant down times too?
I knew about this about a month ago (I know Blaine pretty well) and he says he is happy at Yahoo.
@Andrew - The only blame that can be laid on Blaine is a lack of project scope from the outset. His code (at least that which I’ve seen) is actually quite good.
It’s pretty easy to armchair quarterback Twitter, but the truth is they just plain didn’t (couldn’t?) plan for the kind of scale they grew to.
Talented people are always wanted. It’s great that he could find and develop his own unique talent.
Wow! Good for Yahoo. First time seeing a POST on TC saying Yahoo Hired a person. After reading a lot about people leaving Yahoo on TC.
Heard/read a lot about Cook, through TC. So finally Twitter could not get him back..
Good luck BC.
Cheers, Nag
Glad to see this news is now public. Good snag for Yahoo!
Good luck, Blaine.
And hopefully u will be engaged in more important projects than FireEagle
Cheers
incidentally, what isn’t covered in TC is that Yahoo has been hiring aggressively in India, especially on the R & D and software development side.
Good luck Blaine.
I was also interviewed at Yahoo by Peter Ford. Unfortunately I Google for javascript functions and come from the C++ world, so I wasn’t the ideal Candidate. Good luck Blaine.
Good luck Blaine. looking forward to see what happens with yahoo.
you have a problem with your RSS feed, can you fix that
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch
Hit that in IE7 or FF on WIN, and you’ll notice your feeds aren’t working properly. Specifically, the error I get when manually trying to load your feed is:
XML error: Invalid character at line 285, column 30
This pertains to the following text in your rss:
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~r
Shameless plug -
http://www.pilotoutlook.com
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Expect a lot of DOWN TIME from Yahoo fire eagle in the near future. and the only way to keep it up, someone need to monitor the server every second.
I hope yahoo stays on its feet i’ve always liked them.
http://pixblix.com
The problem with Twitter is that they didn’t really know what the product was when they built it, therefore its not engineered badly just incorrectly. Its highly dynamic so can’t easily be cached, and database calls with Rails are expensive.
YAAAAHOOHTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
“Jabber-based real-time backend” - hope I never meet one of these.
Does that mean Yahoo is using Ruby & Rails for some projects? Or did we already know that? I thought they were focusing all their new dev efforts on PHP.
Anyone have any insight?
@tim As far as I know, they are currently developing the FireEagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ with Rails, so that’s what BC is going to be working on.
Cheers
@ Techlusive (Aka Chris)
I was also interviewed at Yahoo by Peter Ford…[snip]… so I wasn’t the ideal Candidate.
Or… they didn’t want you because they know about your racist rants and current status as TechCrunch’s leading troll?
Just saying…
@ryan wrote “The problem with Twitter is that they didn’t really know what the product was when they built it, therefore its not engineered badly just incorrectly.”
How does that explain the many months since the redesign that was going to fix everything? If they can’t design, at least throw more hardware at it.
Soinds like a great hire. Good luck Blaine!
Interesting news in the context of all those smart people fleeing Yahoo!
Maybe they’ll come up with something cool.
http://pixblix.com