“Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.”
Semisonic - Closing Time by hushhush112
I walked through the doors of Apture June 29th, 2009. I was so excited to work there I showed up two hours early and hungout in a coffee shop across the street until someone showed up from the team. I started on the team as a Community Manager. You can see my thoughts on being a Community Manager here. Over the last two years I’ve learned so much that rambling on and on for paragraphs wouldn’t be fun to read for you. So I thought I’d do a list of my 3 favorite moments of the last two years with the team.
1. Apture Magic Search Bar aka “The Prestige”
Late one night at the Apture office @kurafire , @tristanharris and I were banging our heads on the desk about how to build this really magical search experience on publisher pages when we had that aha moment. And the Apture Magic Search Bar was born. By SXSW 2010 we had shipped it. This ranks slightly ahead of #2 simply because of the excitement of the night we came up with it. At one point we called @kansteven and made him drive all the way from Menlo Park to the office in San Francisco at midnight to partake in the development.
When we showed the team a mock of it the next day @cansar heavily breathed into a bag to contain his excitement 
2. Apture Hotspots
As of yesterday we unveiled Apture Hotspots to the public. This to me is the culmination of the vision set back for Apture from the beginning. The idea of fundamentally changing the way people browse the web. We are empowering readers and publishers to work together to make articles smarter, more engaging and more connected. For example if enough readers look up the term “Angkor Wat” on your post Apture will automatically insert a Hotspot for future readers allowing them to instantly see what “Angkor Wat” is without having to leave the page. What this does is essentially connect the web in a whole new way, keeping readers engaged and happy on publishers pages.
It’s the best product I’ve ever had a hand in building.
3. Hiring Angelo DiNardi
If you don’t follow Angelo’s twitter stream you should. You’ll often see him yelling at Microsoft to die in a fire. His passion shows through on everything he builds. Without him the front end of Apture especially the New Search Experience simply wouldn’t have been possible. I think back to all of the projects he’s had a hand in helping with and like a team player he always executed and delivered something that’s world class. Quite simply he’s a gem.
Starting Monday I’ll be down at the DogPatch to work on my former side project Open Home Pro fulltime.
Still reading? Watch me get flying arm bared below.
