# On Moving On

A year ago, I made the bold choice to move on from Dotdash. When I joined Dotdash, it was called Investopedia. There were a bunch of people I liked and respected there, and I was excited to join. Fast-forwarding a year and a half, we'd been acquired. Things were fine, but I guess I must have wanted more.

# Ancient History Digression

I may have told you about my last contract with Haemonetics and the offer I passed up to be on a Betable seed team. Kris Sabourin called me up and offered to have me join his group, but I was tied up in my contract and didn't feel like I could walk away. That decision haunted me for a year as I saw that fantastic team get built out and go on to do great things.

I told myself, as I tried multiple times to join the team that if Kris ever called again, I would give it serious consideration.

One year ago, the phone rang, and it was Kris.

# The Big Pitch

Have you ever had your perception of the world and what it was possible to know just thoroughly shaken? If you, like me, grew up without the internet, you might have come to the same conclusion I did some years ago, when I discovered that pretty much the sum of all human knowledge is available for anyone who cares to look for it, on the web. If you grew up with the internet, maybe it's a little more taken-for-granted, but that kind of explosion of knowledge was a big deal.

When Kris explained to me what Scope AR was trying to be, I had another one of those world-changing shifts. It felt like, with augmented reality, the way industry goes about training, knowledge-share, and quality control could be altered, for the better, forever. Combine the possibility of contributing to that kind of shift with the chance to work with Kris again, and you have me leaving Dotdash for Scope AR.

# That didn't last long

Okay, well, I can't say that I regret leaving Dotdash for Scope AR. I saw a chance to take a shot and I took it. Swung for the fences, let's say.

I feel like I did pretty well. There was Ruby on Rails, and some React. There was lots of work to do, and there were people willing to work hard.

Unfortunately, some important things were missing, and, while I believe that what Scope is doing can be really effective, their market was large companies and their prices were prohibitively expensive. So, instead of a knowledge revolution, it felt more like building a gated community. Lucrative, but not transformative.

I don't want to get into the inciting incidents that led to me walking away, but I do have some lessons I learned from my time there:

• When multiple people tell you a thing about a place and they say, "Oh no, we're not like that!" it's probably best to believe the group that have nothing to gain from what they're telling you.
• A few bad apples really can spoil a barrel.

# Where Is Liam Now?

I returned to Dotdash, albeit on a different team than I was when I left, and I'm very happy to be back. I'm back to working primarily on the front-end with VueJS, which has been my favourite framework so far.