Corey Leigh Latislaw is leaving Philly to work for Pinterest

We have some bittersweet news to report today: Philly-based Android evangelist and public speaker Corey Leigh Latislaw is leaving Philly for the West Coast.
On Dec. 12, the 36-year-old developer will be officially joining image curation site Pinterest at its San Francisco HQ as head of customer experience for Android. News of her career move comes at the heels of her nomination as Technologist of the Year at the 2016 Philly Geek Awards.
Latislaw said the image curation site had initially contacted her about an position on the development team, but she was interested in something large. As luck would have it, there was one position more akin to her strategy.
But luck has little to do with it. After all, Latislaw’s gravitas in the Android field warranted Google to select her for the Google Developer Experts program (and that’s only one somewhat-recent accolade).
So what is the dev bringing to Pinterest? Mainly, of course, her passion for Android as a platform and its potential. Here’s her keynote speech on that topic at droidconDE Berlin:

“Internally, the focus has been iOS first,” said Latislaw. “[Pinterest] needed internal leadership to evangelize on the capabilities that the platform has.”
Will she miss Philly, though, the city that witnessed her growth since 2010? “Confession: I love Philadelphia and extremely sad to be leaving,” the Florida native said.

So many talented tech and design professionals are leaving the city of Philadelphia. What’s going on, Philly?

— Jessica Ivins (@jessicaivins) October 24, 2016

Could Philly have done anything to keep Latislaw from becoming one more talent on the brain-drain list? The size and scope of the opportunity is what eventually drew the Android expert to Silicon Valley.
“I hate to be one of the statistics,” Latislaw said.