Friday June 7th will be my last day at Microsoft.

I've been at Microsoft longer than I've been a husband, longer than I've been a father, longer than I've lived in the Pacific Northwest. It's been an awesome twenty year plus ride, but the time has come for me to take on new challenges.

I'm joining NEO Global Development's brand new Seattle office (which is really in Redmond). NEO is a community driven open source project delivering the technical underpinnings for the Smart Economy. NEO Global Development (aka NGD) is the technical R&D arm of the NEO Foundation, the NEO project's governing body. I'm going to be the Chief Architect for the Seattle office.

This move will reunite me with former colleague and long-time friend John deVadoss. I worked for John for back in my Architecture Strategy Team days. John is the director of NGD's Seattle office and I'm thrilled to be working with him again.

I had the privilege of presenting at NEO DevCon back in February. It was inspiring to meet folks from NEO's global community. NGD's main office is in Shanghai, NSPCC is in St. Petersberg, NeoResearch is in Brasil and the City of Zion community has team members from all corners of the Earth. I can't lie - the opportunity to work with this far reaching and diverse global community was a big selling point for me joining NGD Seattle.

NGD Seattle's primary focus is on developer tools and experience ('natch) for the NEO platform. John and my-soon-to-be-colleague Longfei Wang previewed a few things we're working on last month at Consensus 2019. In particular John showed off NEO Express Node, a private NEO blockchain management tool that I built. Of course, the Consensus preview is just a small taste of what we plan to deliver - especially once I join NGD full time and we build out more of our Seattle based engineering team.

While developer experience will be my primary focus, I also expect to pitch in on the core NEO platform. NEO 3.0 development is already in full swing. Core platform might not be my focus, but platform capabilities and developer experience go hand in hand. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunity to contibute to the core as we work towards our 3.0 release.

I'll miss Microsoft - especially the amazing people I've had the opportunity to work with over the years. It's particularly hard to leave the xlang project. Cross platform language projection has been a passion project of mine for several years now. Knowing xlang is in the capable hands of folks like Ben, Scott, Ryan and Kenny does make it easier. Besides, xlang is open source so I can still submit PRs if I get really Microsoft-homesick, right?

It's been a looooong time, but I finally got around to geting DevHawk back online. It's hard to believe that it's been over a year since my last post. Lots has happened in that time!

First off, I've changed jobs (again). Last year, I made the switch from program manager to dev. Unfortunately, the project I was working on was cancelled. After several months in limbo, I was reorganized into the .NET Core framework team back over in DevDiv. I've got lots of friends in DevDiv and love the open source work they are doing. But I really missed being in Windows. Earlier this year, I joined the team that builds the platform plumbing for SmartGlass. Not much to talk about publicly right now, but that will change sometime soon.

In addition to my day job in SmartGlass, I'm also pitching in to help the Microsoft Services Disaster Response team. I knew Microsoft has a long history of corporate giving. However, I was unaware of the work we do helping communities affected by natural disasters until recently. My good friend Lewis Curtis took over as Director of Microsoft Services Disaster Response last year. I'm currently helping out on some of the missions for Nepal in response to the devestating earthquake that hit there earlier this year.

Finally, I decided that I was tired of running Other Peoples Code^tm on my website. So I built out a new blog engine called Hawk. It's written in C# (plus about 30 lines of JavaScript), uses ASP.NET 5 and runs on Azure. It's specifically designed for my needs - for example, it automatically redirects old DasBlog style links like http://devhawk.net/2005/10/05/code+is+model.aspx. But I'm happy to let other people use it and would welcome contributions. When I get a chance, I'll push the code up to GitHub.

I’ve done a lot of different jobs in my 15+ years at Microsoft. All of them have been development related in one way or another. Development consulting, developer evangelism, architecture evangelism, IT architect, etc. For the past six years, I’ve been a program manager for a developer related technology – first for IronPython and later for Windows Runtime.

It’s been a good run, but I’m taking the opportunity to move from a “development related” job to just being a pure developer.

I can’t talk much the new gig, other than to say I am working with an all-star cast of braniacs including the likes of Joe Duffy, Stephen Toub, Adam Nathan and Krzysztof Cwalina. Just the knowledge osmosis opportunity alone is enough to make my head spin. Luckily, after four years on the Windows Runtime team, I’m already quite used to working around a bunch of braniacs – though arguably a less well known in the community bunch once you get beyond than the unestimable Larry Osterman.

As for this blog, I hope to be blogging more in the future. No promises, but certainly I can’t blog much less than I have for the past several years (zero posts for all of 2013 is kind of depressing). In particular, I’ve been away from production development for many, many, many years so I figure there is lots of interesting topics to focus on as I make this transition. In particular, I don’t have a classic “algorithms and data structures” computer science background. Based on the interview questions I got – all related to linked lists and binary search trees – I’m guessing this is an area where I really need to sharpen the saw.

Hope you all have liked the various technology I’ve worked on so far. Here’s hoping you like what comes next even more.

My team is hiring. I don’t have a link to the job description on the Microsoft Careers site yet, but the job description is below.

Interested? Send me mail.

IC PM2/Senior Program Manager Position in the Windows Developer Experience Team

Do you want to help ship the most ambitious release of Windows to date? Do you want to make your impact on millions of developers and hundreds of millions of users?

We are the Developer Experience Team. We are building the next generation of developer technologies for creating Windows applications. Our platform powers the new APIs that developers will use to create stunning new Windows applications. You will own the design and delivery of key platform features that will be used by developers in the Windows org, at Microsoft, and around the world to create the APIs that power the next generation of Windows applications.

What do we need from you? Awesomeness. What exactly does that mean? You can drive ambiguous goals independently to completion. You know what needs to get done and by when. You lead by example, cat-herd by necessity, and make a positive impact on your peers in PM, Dev and Test. Others in your org seek out your help because they know you will get it done, or that you will show them how to get it done better if they are coming to you for advice.

Requirements:

• You have 5+ years of experience in Program Management.
• You love software developers and can see the world from their perspective.
• You have strong JavaScript/C#/C++ skills
• You have completed multiple ship cycles on a large-scale product.
• You have intellectual horsepower and creativity, and can quickly adapt to new technologies and go deep in new areas.
• You have excellent communication and partnering skills. You can drive features
  across teams who have different needs and priorities.
• Experience delivering developer platforms a significant plus.

I’m just starting the third week in my new job – though between Thanksgiving and an intestinal virus, I’ve only been in my office for five days total so far. That’s not enough time to establish enough groundwork to be comfortable talking about what my team is doing yet. However, I just found out we’re still hiring and better yet there’s a public description of the job opening. So if you’ve ever thought “I want to work for Microsoft/Windows Division/With Harry”, here’s your chance! And if you aren’t looking for a new job, at least you can get some small hints as to what I’m doing in my new gig – “building substantial improvements into the Windows development platform” sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

Senior Program Manager(708846 -External)

Job Category: Software Engineering: Program Management
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Job ID: 708846 9986
Product: Windows 
Division: Windows Division

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Developers are the key to the success of Windows and at the center of a software ecosystem that represents hundreds of billions of dollars. Our team is chartered with reinvigorating the Windows developer ecosystem by building substantial improvements into the Windows development platform (APIs, tools and the underlying infrastructure) and making developing for Windows fun!

The team is currently seeking a Senior Program Manager to help us achieve our mission. The ideal candidate will have:

• Strong core PM competencies with special emphasis on developer tools and collaboration skills.
• Proven track-record of delivering results in a cross-team (ideally cross-division) environment.
• Has been a Program Manager shipping key products for at least 6 years.
• Deep empathy for the developer as a customer; ability to empathize through 1st hand experience of writing apps some of the issues developers are facing with respect to APIs, tooling such as Visual Studio and SDK.
• A demonstrated track record of excellence and delivering in ambiguous V1 situations.
• Has Bachelors in Computer Science or engineering.