Meet Fred LeBlanc, our Sixth Whale
There’s an awful lot to say about Fred LeBlanc—how we found him, how he found us, why we like him, and so on and so on. But the simplest way to put it is this: we were looking for a developer, and we found a Whale.
We had a lot of great responses to our job posting (reproduced here for posterity). And we gave a few people some pretty serious consideration. But Fred pretty much had our hearts from day one (click one, to be precise).
It’s not just that he wrote a popular and useful jQuery plugin, or that his blog is impeccably designed and gorgeously coded, or that he wore a Ghostbusters shirt to his job interview. It’s not even that he created a long, thoughtful, personalized Web letter of interest and put it behind a password page designed in the image of the gates of Moria.
It’s all those things, plus so many other things. For example: His blog posts about the cost of commuting, cognitive psychology and personal space on the train, his conspiracy theory about Radiohead albums, and his bro at Best Buy. His fascinatingly public efforts at weight loss. His Flickr page, which for some reason captivated all of us. The fact like he, just like Janie, isn’t on Facebook and doesn’t like Arcade Fire. The local pride on quiet display in his website’s footer. The question he asked in an email to all of us about why we talk about XHTML more than HTML.
He is, that is to say, funny, confident, very talented, and incredibly personable. These are the characteristics of a Whale; thus Fred is a Whale. We consider ourselves very lucky to have him aboard.
Some details about Fred’s upcoming life as a Whale:
- He will work from his home in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Maybe if we can get him and his lovely wife to visit the Bay Area often enough, our great weather and rough-and-tumble municipal politics will win him over, but right now the plan is for him to telecommute permanently. Fortunately, he videoconferences really well.
- He will be deeply involved with LiveWhale, our CMS, both at the user interface level (just look at the attention to detail in his portfolio!) and at the front-facing level. Having him aboard will give us the headroom to talk more with the public about LiveWhale, and we foresee a year of growth and excitement for it.
- We plan to make more of our tools freely accessible to the public this year— from projects you might know about, like Quick Access, to secret projects that have been sitting in the lab for a while now, like Omnivore and FAQmachine. Fred’s experience with his own jQuery work will be important to us as we go forward with that.
Welcome aboard, Fred!
(Here’s his side of the story.)