If the title isn't clear enough, then let me clarify. On March 7th, I'll be joining Microsoft as a Senior Premier Field Engineer on the Azure team! The news couldn't be more exciting, exhilarating and scary at the same time. But let's rewind a little bit.
A bit of history
I've been working as a software developer for over 12 years. During these years, I was in a permanent role for 7 of them, before becoming a contractor/consultant/one-man band. The first part of my career was all about building my knowledge and experience. I've worked with some really competent and charismatic developers so I was in good hands. The second part was putting all my skills in good use and having fun by doing the same things as before but in a much, much faster and demanding pace. Working as a contractor, changing projects, teams and companies was a real eye-opener. In a good way. I got to work with many great developers, get acquainted with lots of different codebases (good and bad) and made new friends. I learned tons of new stuff, something that's quite hard in a permanent role (usually). During the past 2 years, I stepped up my contribution to the dev community by working on many Open Source projects, writing on my blog and speaking at conferences about things I love and I'm passionate about.
I got used to this. A fast-paced, continually learning environment while working with many different technologies and frameworks. If you've never done contracting before, I highly recommend it! You'll learn so much and it will help you grow as a developer in ways you never anticipated. That's probably a subject for another post
The future
My move to Microsoft was totally unplanned but came at a perfect time as I was thinking seriously about my next career step. It's needless to say that I'm really excited for becoming part of Microsoft and, in particular, the Azure team. It's a dream come true because I'll be joining (some of) the people I admire to work on a platform I'm really passionate about. The cloud has been a big part of my work in the past few years so having a chance to focus on this and help developers get better at using it, is something I truly look forward to.
My plans
I've already said that the past couple of years have been full on with my work and Open Source work, talks and writing. My new role will not detract from that. The exact opposite. There may be slightly more focus on Azure (it will be my core function after all) but I plan to turn things up a notch and continue contributing and helping the community become bigger and better.
As always, you can always email me if you have any questions or need help with anything and make sure you stay tuned for new, exciting and creating content, news and how-tos.