As many of you already know, I recently switched jobs, while moving out to the country just outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia. It was actually very bittersweet for me, and required a lot of soul-searching and second-guessing.

As a bit of a Cliff's Notes background, back in 2004 I left the consulting company I was working for (Series-I Support Services, Inc.) to pursue a little bit less of a consulting arrangement. I went to work for a company called Digimax Development, which had recently hired a new CEO and was in the process of re-branding itself as Lime Systems. Although this company was still technically a consulting company (companies with zero tech people hired us to develop their projects), it wasn't an on-site contract employment-style consulting company. It was more of an in-house technology company. Additionally, there were plenty of talks about products in the pipeline to move away from consulting income and into a more product/sales-based workflow.

One of our clients at the time was Performance Media Group (PMG), a business-to-business travel company, who began to branch out into consumer travel with their web application Travel Tribe.

Although I wasn't the primary developer on Travel Tribe (while working at Lime Systems), I was involved in quite a few of the programming sprints. The original concept was that of a competitor to Travel Zoo, with Travel Tribe having its "hot deals" newsletter. Travel Tribe also offered a "get matched" functionality allowing travelers to get matched up with appropriately qualified travel agents. This was back in 2005; well before Tripology ever came onto the scene.

Eventually I left Lime Systems, but as fate would have it, I wasn't quite done with Travel Tribe. Not long after parting ways with my former employer, I found myself working directly for a newly formed technology division of PMG with two other former co-workers. It was here that I began to work diligently on the Travel Tribe idea. At this time, MySpace and YouTube were gaining popularity and our CEO decided that Travel Tribe needed to be the MySpace or YouTube of travel. I was the AJAX/Web 2.0 specialist, so I spent a ton of time working with the CTO to develop Travel Tribe into a social network.

A few years ago, the CTO elected to leave the company, and I was handed the reigns to Travel Tribe. I slowly started to convince the CEO that we needed to be less the MySpace (or Facebook) of Travel and more the Travel Tribe of travel. My determination to make Travel Tribe a success led to a lateral move in the company and a promotion to Director of Development. I had my hands in everything Travel Tribe related - from sales support and marketing to development and content. I even brought on board Joshua Porter of Bokardo Design to help flesh out the user experience.

We were maybe six hard months away from the finish line when the economy collapsed. And like any company, when the money dries up, the managers start looking for ways to cut costs. Our CEO had way too much emotionally invested in Travel Tribe - so dumping the project wasn't an option. From the numbers that I could add up, Travel Tribe broke even anyway. But it became a matter of how to get Travel Tribe permanently in the black. It seemed like every week a new idea began to pop up, and my time was being split between working on the heart of Travel Tribe and working on different projects or non-core items in a hopes to boost immediate sales to get Travel Tribe floating above the water. It was a constant tug-and-pull with different egos, different ideas and more importantly different motivating techniques and stress levels.

In the end, we called it creative differences and I resigned as Director of Development of Travel Tribe, agreeing to remain available to whomever takes my place for a certain period of time.

I wanted Travel Tribe to be my legacy. Once completed, I could see it surpassing web sites like Dopplr, TripIt or Wayn. I wanted to be able to point to it in latter years and say "I did that." Why else would I work so far under scale at the company? The project meant more than the salary.

But at the end of the day, that light that I kept seeing at the end of the development tunnel was just an illusion. Every time I felt like I was reaching it, I ended up in a battle to maintain the integrity and focus of the web site. The light then got further away.

I treated Travel Tribe as if it were my own web site, and did what was necessary to make it a success; but ultimately, it wasn't my web site, and certain other decisions trumped my own. I could grin-and-bear it, or I could move on. I elected to move on. I will always want Travel Tribe to succeed. It's just a shame that I can't be there when it happens.