New Day. New Role. New Possibilities

New Day

Things change. That is a constant in life. Sometimes they change for the better, other times we are not so lucky. The best representation of this change in nature, in my opinion, is the path of the sun on a daily basis. It rises and it falls. In between, it is in a state of constant movement through the sky. That comparison is one of the reasons I love Florida. You can watch the sunrise at a Gulf Coast beach, and watch it set at an Atlantic Coast beach, live, and in the same day.

 

 

Some days are better than others. While some start well, they might not end as nicely, and vice versa. Our careers can be the same way. While I've lived through my share of stormy days, for the most part, I've enjoyed a very "comfortable climate" in my career. As much as we may enjoy a certain day, the only constant in life is that things will change, constantly, like the sun through the sky. Recently, I've experienced a new sunrise in my career.

Old Role

I've been at Microsoft since October 2016. I had the amazing opportunity to join the the Premier Support for Developers(PremDev) consulting team. If you're not familiar, the PremDev team is the team that Bradley Ball works on as well. It's a great team of some of the most knowledgeable professionals in the Cloud, Development, and Data spaces. They work with customers to help with proactive projects and advisement on using new and emerging technologies. The last almost two years has been a great learning experience for me. Being a part of the team helped to open my eyes to the "development" side of our world. I've had the opportunity to work with some of our most interesting customers and help them take on their most interesting and perplexing work loads. But just as my analogy shows, the sun must set on every day, and each opportunity.

New Role

As the sun rises, I am now a member of the FastTrack for Azure team at Microsoft as a Senior FastTrack Engineer. We are a part of the Customer Experience team under the Azure Engineering group. We help customers move their workloads to Azure, by offering customers education and advisement. For me, it has always been a dream to work with the engineering teams (aka the Product Group) to help make our products better. Now I have that opportunity.

 

New Possibilities

With a new sunrise, comes a wealth of new possibilities for the new day. In my new role, I get the opportunity to help bring customers in to the cloud, while taking the feedback from our customers and passing it back to the engineering team. Also, this role gives me the opportunity to get better at not being the "give me the keyboard" guy. We want to teach our customers "how to fish" when it comes to deploying in Azure, not "bring them the fish". Our goal is to help customers become self sustaining with Azure. My hope is that with this position I can get back on the conference trail and get back to speaking at conferences. As far as "sunrises" go, this is one of the more bright and enjoyable sunrises of my career, and I'm excited for the opportunities that the new day brings.