Officially, as of the start of the year, I've joined Faculty.

Faculty is not just new to me, but something altogether new. It's also something that feels older than it is. The familiar, experienced kind of old. The good kind. The kind I like.

It was founded by my good friend and long-term colleague Chris Shiflett, whom I'm very happy to be working with, directly, again.

People often ask us how long we've worked together, and the best answer I can come up with is "around 15 years"—nearly all of the mature part of my career. Since the early 2000s, Chris and I have attended and spoken at conferences together, he wrote a column for PHP Architect under my watch as the Editor-in-Chief, I worked on Chris's team at OmniTI, we ran Web Advent together, and we worked collaboratively at Fictive Kin.

A surprised "fifteen years!" is a common response, understandably—that's an eternity in web time. On a platform that reinvents itself regularly, where we (as a group) often find ourselves jumping from trend to trend, it's a rare privilege to be able to work with friends with such a rich history.

This kind of long-haul thinking also informs the ethos of Faculty, itself. We're particularly interested in mixing experience, proven methodologies and technology, and core values, together with promising newer (but solid) technologies and ideas. We help clients reduce bloat, slowness, and inefficiencies, while building solutions to web and app problems.

We care about doing things right, not just quickly. We want to help clients build projects they (and we) can be proud of. We remember the promise—and the output—of Web 2.0, and feel like we might have strayed a little away from the best Web that we can build. I'm really looking forward to leveraging our team's collective and collected experience to bring excellence, attention to detail, durability, and robustness to help—even if in some small way—influence the next wave of web architecture and development.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, we're actively seeking new clients. Drop us a note. I can't wait.