(Re)Introduction

I wrote my first post on this blog over 10 years ago. I've written over 100 posts, including 9 '4+ Star Ratings' posts (whatever that means). Why do I need to write a post titled (Re)Introduction?

Well, a bit of a deeper dive into my blogging history shows that I wrote a bunch of posts in 2005 and 2006, between 3 and 8 posts per year from 2007 to 2012, and a big fat zero for 2013. And 2014. And 2015. And now it's 2016… over 10 years since I started blogging and about time to start doing some writing again.

Let's get the (re)introduction part of this post out of the way. There are definitely some constants from 2005. I still work for Microsoft at the Fargo campus. I still work on the Dynamics product line, specifically Dynamics AX which I've worked on for several years now. Fargo is still in the prairie, so the blog title still works.

But there are changes as well. My beard has more gray hair to start with. My elementary school daughter is in college. My, how the time flies…. but I digress. I've played several different roles in my 14 years at MSFT - dev lead, dev manager, test manager, test architect, and engineering manager. I've worked both on the foundation side of AX (the kernel, development tools, client, etc) and in the past four years on the application side (the modules like human resources and the various financial modules). While I've been personally changing roles, the software industry and Microsoft have also been making significant changes. Lots of change.

The trigger for recharging this blog is having something to write about, of course. That means that I a) am passionate about sharing the content, b) feel that it will be useful to a Dynamics focused audience, and c) able to share it.

All three of these things are coming together in my current role which I've dubbed 'test architect v2'.  How we think about quality in a "cloud first world mobile first world with unified engineering" has changed - most of it for the better. I'll be writing about how it has changed internally and provide thoughts on how it could and should impact the Dynamics AX ecosystem. Hopefully that will be useful to you. Finally, I'll be able to share more about the new version of Dynamics AX over the coming months.