After nearly two years in MSIT and six years focused on architecture across three different roles, I’m moving on to a new job in the Developer Division. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be joining the Dynamic Languages team as a program manager. This is the team who ships IronPython, IronRuby, the Dynamic Language Runtime and Dynamic Silverlight. After seeing all the their cool work at Lang.NET this year, I just had to be a part of it.
As you might imagine, I’m pretty excited about this opportunity.
In the short term, I’ll be primarily focused on IronPython, which is marching towards their 2.0 release. Towards that end, I’m attending PyCon 2008 in Chicago this weekend, though I don’t officially change jobs for a couple more weeks. Longer term…well let’s just say I’m going to be really focused on doing my part to get IPy 2.0 out the door and after that we’ll see where things lie. This is a pretty big shift for me, so I’m explicitly trying to focus on short term work for the first six months in order to absorb as much knowledge as possible from the folks I’ll be working with like Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Martin Maly, Jimmy Schementi and a bunch of others who I haven’t met yet.
While this is a pretty big role shift, I haven’t given up my passion for services and/or architecture. In other words, this isn’t the last you’ll hear about Kitchen Sink Variability, the ROI of EA or my perspective on Nick’s Shared Integration Model. Obviously, with the job focus change, I expect focus on my blog to change as well. I’m not exactly sure how blogging fits into this new role, though the Dynamic Languages team is pretty open and many other members blog (as linked above) so I doubt I’m going anywhere. I’m going to try and keep blogging Morning Coffee, but I’m guessing it won’t be quite as regular as it has been in the past. Unfortunately, I am going to stop coding F# for a while (sorry, Don!) I can’t focus on learning two languages at once and obviously Python is my new top priority.
I wasn’t in my MSIT architect role that long, but I feel that the “in the trenches” experience will serve me greatly for years to come. And of course, I will miss my teammates, especially Dale who regular readers might remember from filling in around here occasionally.
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