Who am I?

My bio (since many of you asked :-)):

I'm a product manager at Microsoft patterns & practices, doing a lot of interesting stuff but mainly focusing on Smart Client guidance offerings. As you already know patterns & practices, ships guides and best practices to build enterprise solutions on the Microsoft platform.

What does a product manager (PdM) do? we are the "customer voice", identifying scenarios where the team will invest its resources in, responsible for balancing requirements and helping set priorities. Even though the title "Product Manager" is associated with marketing stuff, I'm a pretty techincal guy and I like to get involved in the technical details of the projects I participate in.

I'm very happy to be part of this team and I'm fortunate to be surrounded by really sharp and smart people from whom I learn a ton every day.

I was born in Argentina but was fortunate to travel all around the world. I have a degree in electronics and computer science from ITBA. I worked for about 4.5 years in Microsoft Argentina in the consulting organization (Microsoft Consulting Services) before joining patterns & practices. I'm mostly known there for working in the design and development of an .NET application framework named MBI that we used as a the foundation for many projects all around Latin America. I'm very proud of what we achieved with MBI. It was one of the frameworks patterns & practices looked at for requirements when they built EDRA (a.k.a. Shadowfax).

I did hardware development in the beginning of my career, then a lot of Unix system programming with different flavors of the OSs (HPUX, QNX, etc). Then I discovered VB (3, 4, 5 and 6) and I was amazed by its power and for many years used it as the main platform together with C dlls for complicated or low level stuff. I also did a lot of Mainframe integration projects using all the IBM networking APIs and fell in love with CICS' power and simplicity. Deep in my heart I'm an engineer, so I enjoy getting things done which are essentially useful.

I feel I was very lucky in having good teachers throughout my career: Eduardo Martinez, Angel Pugnet, Mario Pieri, Robert Schatz, Guillermo Villanueva to name a few.

Now I live in Sammamish with my wonderful wife and our children. This is a little, nice town in the US Northwest region about 30 min from Redmond where Microsoft headquartes are. This is a very nice place indeed. I'm always amazed at the beautiful nature that surrounds us. Having lived in a big city like Buenos Aires, it is a big contrast. For example, it's not unusual to see deer and other examples of wildlife walking or flying around the neighborhood and yes, it rains but rain is also one of the reasons of the beauty, and I like contrasts in nature like well defined seasons.

Besides technologies I have other interests like: sailing, woodworking, painting, music, history and languages (programming and human) and lately I become interested in psychology. I also read everything that ends in my hands. One of the things I enjoy the most is working in such a diverse environment like Microsoft, that exposes me to a huge number of different cultures something truly enriching.