Russ Garrett

Earlier this week, I handed in three months’ notice – I’m leaving Last.fm at the beginning of October. It’s been more than six years since I started working on a small project called Audioscrobbler with RJ, and since the founders’ leaving I’m now the longest-serving member of staff. It’s been massively fun and Last.fm is still an awesome place to work, but I think it’s time for a change.

That said, it’ll be nice not to work in a company which is constantly subject to perplexingly arbitrary rules and unrealistic royalties set by increasingly out-of-touch record labels.

It feels like a lot of my work in the last few years has been trying to prevent myself from being such a single point of failure. It’s quite a relief to be in a situation where I can finally leave.

As for what I’m doing next; I’m going to work for Smarkets heading up tech operations. I think it’ll be quite a different challenge to Last.fm, and it’ll be great to work for a proper startup again. It should be fun.

(If you’re interested in coming to work for Last.fm, we have a couple of vacancies in our ops department on a variety of levels.)

Tags: lastfm, personal, smarkets.

So, finally I have one of these blog things again.

I’ve mainly started this up again because I need somewhere to dump technical systemsy stuff which nobody else seems to write/care about. Plus RJ has one now and I can’t be outdone on that ground.

Hopefully it’ll at least be a bit more useful than the previous page-of-links.

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