Leaving Microsoft

After three and a half years of supporting production developers, I’ve come to realize how much I miss actually writing production code.  To that end, I’m heading back to my roots as a developer. I’ve taken a position with Northwoods Software in Brown Deer, WI.

This was not an easy decision to make. My dream when I was a college student at MSOE was to one day work for Microsoft and I got to live that dream for six and a half years I’ve had the chance to work with some of the smartest folks I’ve ever run into anywhere and working with them day to day will definitely be missed.  I also got to work with a ton of great customers doing amazing things with Microsoft technology.  It was actually these folks who planted the seeds of jealousy - they got to use the new tools and techniques to create real, living and breathing stuff while I had to settle for churning out sample code.

My options in the Microsoft field to get back in the game (so-to-speak) were limited. My choices were to go back to MCS (where I spent my first three years here), or look at getting a SDE job with a product group and move my family to Redmond.  The MCS life is nice if you can hack the travel, but I'm not the spring chicken I used to be and it is nice to see the family at night.  We've set down some pretty deep roots in the Milwaukee area, so heading west wasn't really an option either.

I’m around for the rest of the month mainly transitioning accounts and tying up loose ends. Going forward, this blog will move to a more permenant home at https://www.hirlpoo.com/ though for prosperity sake, the stuff here on MSDN will stay. That URL points back here for now, but I'll post a final entry once the new site is up and running so you can update your bookmarks and RSS feed.