dive into mark

So, I work for IBM now. I’m an Accessibility Architect in the Emerging Technologies group. That is exactly as cool as it sounds.

I mentioned this yesterday to someone who only knows me through this site and various other online activities, and his immediate reaction was Oh, because of Atom, right? Which is amusing, since Atom is such a small part of my life right now. I get the sense that people think of me as some sort of cyber-Godfather, wandering the streets of New York in my bathrobe, muttering about Atom and ordering hits on people who don’t support it. I also think people think that every single one of IBM’s 300,000 employees has personally devoted themselves to promoting one XML data format over another.

I interviewed with 6 different people to get this job, and no one asked me about Atom, or syndication, or weblogging technologies of any kind. I met 8 other team members during the course of my first day, and no one asked me about Atom, or syndication, or weblogging technologies of any kind. It just never came up. It’s a big world, and blogs aren’t even close to being the center of it.

Which is not to say that the things I do here in my spare time don’t matter. It was noted during one interview that searching Google for accessibility yielded me at #7 (for Dive Into Accessibility) and IBM at #10. (The results have since shifted slightly, but I’m still ahead.) But even this is only tangentially related to my new job. I won’t be focusing on web accessibility specifically. It’s a big world, and IBM does lots of things.

I hope to continue doing many of the things I currently do in my spare time, like this site, my Python book, my XML.com column, various open source projects, and Atom. None of these things has ever been endorsed or sponsored by my employer, and that’s not changing. My job may someday involve saying things in public on behalf of IBM, but I won’t say them here. IBM doesn’t do cat pictures.

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