If there’s one thing I hate it’s “corporate HR” emails, those icky coded messages about comings and goings. Did that guy quit? Was he fired? Is he leaving for the competition? Was he caught behind a fica plant with the CFO’s niece? Meet me in my cubicle and I’ll give you the scoop!

The scoop is that Chris no longer works for LibraryThing. He wrote about it on his own blog, Aspiring CTO. I disagree with much said there, particularly the idea that I don’t like him. But I can’t stand up for users tagging however they like and deny that everyone sees things the way they see them.

As he writes, he loved LibraryThing, and did a lot for it. Most notably he architected and implemented the transition to a scalable server and database structure. The traffic data below, taken from our stats program, is a trophy of sorts to that:

Chris did everything from July on. And during that period, server problems actually went down. And Chris did a number of other valuable projects. When I finish the user-interface, I think he will be best remembered for his elegant LiveJournal-friendly widget.

So, my thanks to Chris for the work he did for LibraryThing. I wish him the best in his future plans. PillHelp in particular seems likely to take off. Since more people take pills than want to catalog their books, I suspect he’ll have some even more challenging scaling issues to deal with.

Members saw his post and started thanking him on Talk. Go ahead and leave comments here or there.

*November is in some metrics higher than December because we got Slashdotted, producing a gigantic two-three-day wave that didn’t last. The underlying fundamentals—users, books in system, money—have continued their accelerating acceleration.

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