Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left Twitter with plans to relocate to the U.K. Instead, we've learned, he took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse, the troubled San Francisco office meant to incubate new projects. He's believed to be working for Chad Dickerson, who recently listed a position for a software engineer experienced in the Ruby programming language — one of Cook's specialties.

Cook, typically a verbose sort online, hasn't mentioned anything about his new job on Twitter or any of his other frequent outlets. Could he be abashed about his new assignment? Yahoo is no one's employer of choice in the Valley these days. But given his noisy departure from Twitter, it's not likely he had many options. And neither did Yahoo.

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