1 year at Comcast

I just completed my first year at Comcast. Its been a gratifying experience thus far, both personally and professionally. I've been having a blast living in downtown Philly - the lifestyle has been wonderful, and the 10 minute walk to work everyday has completely spoiled me for commuting in the future. And Comcast has been a great place to work: an interesting and challenging set of problems, and a good group of people to work with (and for). I'd be lying if I said it was moving as quickly as I'd like - although I think I've made some meaningful contributions throughout my time thus far, the bigger consumer impacting things I've been working on (tru2way and Project Infinity and the like) will only begin showing up in the back half of '08 and only really at significant scale and volume (from a consumption perspective) well into 2009.

That's a long time.

Still, its a complicated technology environment - its a heady mix of legacy technology infrastructures, permutations of configurations and network designs, and a significant scale of problem set and quality-of-service requirements - and just to help, we enjoy a... challenging regulatory environment. (Boy, Those sound like excuses, even as I type them)

In celebration of my year (sort of) I spent last week at NCTA's (National Cable and Telecommunications Association) "The Cable Show". I spoke on a number of panels at the show, which is always fun. The Q&A's are always a bit frustrating, as people come to the shows to get answers, which I have .... but usually can't give. We have enough problems internally distinguishing between *goals* ("we're committed to getting there") and *plans* ("we actually have a path to get there") - no good way to make that distinction clear externally - especially for a public company.

The only real drag has been my travel calendar - would like to slow that down a bit. All in all, though, feels like I'm just getting warmed up here, which is both exciting and depressing, on many levels :)