A New Job, a New Journey

On September 13, 2010, I started a new journey. This was my first day as an official Microsoft employee, and my first day in a new group, MPSD (Managed Platform and Service Delivery), which is a part of System Center. Before this I spent almost 5 years as a vendor here at Microsoft—first as a subject matter expert on mobile development in the patterns & practices group. And then the last 3-1/2 years as a developer in the process team of Team Foundation Server. It was quite a ride, and I’m very proud to  have been part of the team that built Team Foundation Server 2010. You can find my blog posts about the work I did there at this location: https://blogs.socha.com/.

So what caused me to switch to a completely different product and a different team? Agile. And my new team found me—they were looking for a senior developer to help them be more agile, and with development practices. I’d been wanting for a while to be involved in making a highly effective agile team, and this appeared to be a chance for me to do just that.

I plan to blog about agile, and also about development. I’m a long-time developer, and I love building applications that customers use, so in addition to agile practices, I’ll also be blogging about programming—both in C# and C++. Before coming to this team, it had been nearly 12 years since I last did any serious C++ development. And since I learned C#, I thought I’d never again enjoy C++. Well, I was wrong, and I’ll have more to say about that in a future blog.