Why not Insanity?

Writing the first entry in a blog has always seemed to be the hardest. Since this is a new year, and this is all about Something New, I thought I'd take the moment to blather about why I have made the change over from Dev to PM.

I'm part of the Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals - affectionately known as "DataDude" - team. I signed up this summer because the team was looking for someone else (The team has Gert Drapers in it, so there was already plenty of SQL knowledge) with some Deep SQL background and some insight into real-world SQL applications to balance their/our development against. I came on board as a Dev under Gert, and had some small role to play in the push to get V1 out the door (which happened back in the beginning of December).

But I'm greedy. I wanted a broader scope, with more opportunities for Customer contact and keeping my finger on the pulse of what customers - and potential customers - might expect from our product. It's one of the reasons I came on board in the first place, and I was getting a bit concerned that if I sat behind a desk and did nothing but code, I might lose that perspective. So one of the perks of being a PM is that getting out in front of the customers is Part Of The Job.

And, admittedly, I love the conference circuit. Back when I was in MSR (that's Microsoft Research, for those who might not know), I was the PM for the Community Technologies Group, and I got to go to TechEd's and PDC's and evangelize the work we were doing in the Newsgroup space (I'll have to blog more on that some day). Anyway, I thoroughly enjoy that process, and it was something that I really wanted to do again. And face it, there's less opportunity to do that as a developer than as a PM. Now I'm already looking forward to being in SF for the VSLive conference this coming March, and there's more in queue.

At the same time, I don't have to give up Dev entirely - a lot of sample code and proof of concept work is done by PMs. I've spent the last year and a half doing C# (as a 10+ year VB dev, it wasn't that painful at all!) and wouldn't want to let any of that rust! And as we look forward, understanding how potentially the DataDude project might impact the App Tier code is going to be part of the investigation, so...

Anyway, here I am - new year, new job, new challenges. It's all very exciting - with a dash of cautious apprehension. Keep checking in on me - and I'll try to keep something entertaining going on here. Later!

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• Anonymous
  June 06, 2007
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