Thank you, Microsoft, p&p and the community!

After seven exciting and fulfilling years with Microsoft, I’ve made a decision to move on.  Microsoft patterns & practices was an incredible journey for me. I’ve had the rare luxury of working on many great projects with truly amazing, even distinguished people!

In retrospect, my team has accomplished a lot! Many of the assets we shipped under the umbrella of Microsoft Enterprise Library power numerous modern systems around the world.  Introducing Unity and the corresponding guidance helped drive the dependency injection pattern into the mainstream. Wasabi brought autoscaling capabilities to Azure and the Design for IT efficiency imperative made developers more conscious about resource and energy consumption. Guidance projects such as CQRS Journey played the role of a catalyst, drove community consensus, and enhanced our shared understanding of underlying patterns. And our latest introduction of the semantic logging paradigm will change the way developers think about logging and log consumption, especially from the perspective of operational and business intelligence.

I would be remiss not to mention the role my team played in changing the internal perception of OSS and helping Microsoft embrace the open development model. A scribble from my old notebook delivers what seemed to be a rather utopian dream in 2007 and became a reality in 2013:  “What would it take to move EntLib to a completely open-source project? ” It’s amazing how Microsoft’s stance on OSS has changed over the years. I’m grateful and proud for the opportunity to be a part of this change.

With me leaving, the team taking care of Enterprise Library, Unity, SLAB and other application blocks remains strong and committed to delivering on our product backlog. I’ve made sure of that. Expect new strong releases this year. As I’m wrapping my day-to-day activities, I remain in the advisor’s role and will continue helping steer the projects.

Furthermore, as I have helped developers embrace good practices while at p&p, I’ll continue doing so in my new journey. I will challenge myself to something new. However, as those of you who know me, I will stay passionate about software craftsmanship and learning. If you’d like to continue to follow my adventures, visit me at https://blog.gmelnik.com, LinkedIn, or @gmelnik.

There are many colleagues at Microsoft who have supported me through the years. Thank you for your generosity with ideas, feedback, and time. Also, I’d like to recognize many members of the community who I have collaborated with – through your (at times painful) feedback many of our initiatives turned into successes. I respect our dev community big time and will never take you for granted.

Signing off… so long… and thank you all for the best 7 years of my life!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2014
  Your role at P&P certainly helped Microsoft. It won't be the same without you. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you on the CQRS Journey! All the best to you in your next chapter.