A slight refactoring

For almost precisely one year I've been working in the Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocacy team, focused on all things Java. I've enjoyed my time in this team, and I've learned a lot. I've been staggered by the degree to which the team is a magnet for highly skilled, highly motivated, and highly renowned people (I was the only glitch in the hiring matrix). Personally, my big rewards from the past year were two things:

1. I managed to improve my public speaking skills and confidence - I started the year a little rusty, but by the middle of the year I was presenting to rooms of 800 and more people quite regularly, and by the end of the year I gave my first keynote at QCon Shanghai. The large number of presentations I gave came about because not enough conferences said 'no' to me when I submitted, so I found myself travelling and presenting far more than anticipated! I really enjoyed the ability to share my love of developer experience and good API design far and wide. I put up a page on my site that includes a few of the videos, as well as a DZone Refcard that I wrote.
2. When I wasn't travelling, my biggest reward was being able to work across all engineering teams at Microsoft, to ensure their SDKs and APIs were as good as they could be. I really enjoyed the opportunity to bring my Java expertise to a new audience inside Microsoft. I also enjoyed the ability to expose the work of these teams through the Java portal on docs.microsoft.com.

The team I've worked with has been exceptional, and the managers I had above me - Bruno Borges, Tim Heuer, Chad Fowler, Jeff Sandquist - even Scott Guthrie - have been extremely open, available, and supportive of me. Microsoft is a great organisation to be a part of, and the Cloud Developer Advocacy team is an awesome team. I highly encourage everyone suitably qualified to consider joining the team. Ping me if you ever want to learn more.

So, today, I'm excited to say that I'm refactoring things a little :-) As of next week, I am moving out of the Cloud Developer Advocacy team, and I'm taking on a Senior Software Engineer role in the Azure SDK team. My new role is to serve as the Java representative on the architecture board for Azure SDKs, and to help drive excellence in our Java developer experience. I will be heavily involved in driving the API design for our next generation of Java Azure SDKs, working alongside a team of excellent engineers to make this a reality.

I will continue to work remotely from New Zealand, as I have always done, and I look forward to the challenge ahead.