When I started to work for BlueMars, most of the websites still had table layout, but my colleagues soon adopted CSS floats. They did a brilliant job, and after a while everything we produced was semantic and validated. We even did some guerilla accessibility without the project managers or clients knowing, but appreciating the cleanness of the code anyway.

Then came the day when Web Standards Project colleague Glenda Sims asked in her blog “do you love your job?” And I had to admit I wasn’t challenged anymore. I was still learning new things, but my daily work offered few opportunities to implement them. What I really wanted was building accessible, inclusive websites in a company that understood the challenges and consequences of Web 2.0 — an enterprise 2.0 looking for staff 2.0. Where I wouldn’t “run against walls” so often. Where empathy wasn’t just something left to the Dalai Lama.

My new employer is the Swiss company namics, in particular the branch office in Frankfurt. Since Yahoo! was always a benchmark for me — with their openness, their attitude of sharing, their communication — I was surprised to find a European company apparently performing great against those benchmarks. They have internal and external blogs and wikis, they hold internal barcamps and encourage people to speak at conferences. Some of them participate in the technology and usability juries of the Best of Swiss awards, and their CEO is also on the managing committee of the Swiss Library for Blind and Visually Impaired People.

My first job will be accessible, with the client not only knowing, but actually asking for it. Also in March they send me over to SXSW where I will hold a core conversation together with Gez Lemon about Accessible Rich Internet Applications. I’m really looking forward to work for namics. It feels like coming home, already. Thanks to Glenda Sims and Jessica Feldmann for unknowingly encouraging me to take that step. And yes, I will continue to blog here as I own this domain now.

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“Learning the world” was a natural choice for the title. First it is a novel by one of my favorite authors, Ken MacLeod. MacLeod worked as a software developer in Glasgow before he quit his day job and became a full-time writer. His novels are full of detail, but usually his technical equipment has some quirks or is rotten in a way, something I can relate to from my professional background — after all, we deal with browsers, the most complex (and often buggy) environment for application development. As a Trotskyist MacLeod also has a decent political background to envision alternate societies.

Some of his novels are set on a colony called “New Mars,” so the choice is was appropriate for my previous employer BlueMars. Although you might have spotted another relation to science fiction there, the company’s founders were unaware of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy at that time. Finally a central role in MacLeod’s naming novel plays the “biolog” of a space colonist. And when her crew discovers aliens, nothing is like it has been before …

In our world of web standards, alienating things usually come with names like IE, Opera, or Safari. Because of them we have to keep learning new things every day, and sometimes learn everything all over again. Or on the positive side: when a new concept is introduced, like CSS in 1998, or accessibiliy / Design for All in 1999, we have to keep the pace, which makes ours jobs so exciting.

I hope you will be a companion on my journey to new worlds, and be ready to learn some aspects of the old world all over again, every day.