John Durant Moves On

If you've read his blog lately, or visited the Office Developer Center front page, then you know that John Durant has relinquished the reins at the ODC, in order to become a program manager for Visual Studio Tools for Office.

I've worked with John for the better part of two years now, and count myself lucky to have done so. John has been a huge influence on my development as an Office programmer. He was always available for a quick tutoring session on the programming topic of the day, and his enthusiasm for diving into new APIs and finding out what made them tick was great encouragement for someone like me, for whom any API was a new API. His faith that I could become a successful Office programmer-writer is a large part of the reason I am a successful Office programmer-writer.

So I wanted to take a moment and add my personal thanks to the chorus of praise he's been getting this week, and to wish him the best in his new role.

Below is a sketch I did of John in his bike gear, for the ODC portal page. We were waiting to run it this spring, so we never got to use it. (Yes, I know that John bikes year 'round in any weather. But we figured we'd wait to use it at a time of the year most sane people equate with biking-ride weather.)

Ride on, brother.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 12, 2005
  You are way too kind. AJ (Andrew!), I was lucky to be part of an important transition in your career. Someday you could very well be my manager!!!!
  
  I look forward to continuing our work together!