Blog Relaunch

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Well “relaunch” is a little grand, but I thought I’d try to make a bit better use of this blog. The plan is to try to post more regularly, still trying to share code or ideas I’ve found useful which hopefully others may find useful too.

Looking back at my introductory post written nearly 3 years ago, I realise how much my career has changed over that time.

Not long after I posted that message, I moved on from the MSN team based in London to working on the sadly missed (by me anyway!) Windows Live Expo. Technically Expo was an interesting challenge, as we were attempting to build a scalable system dealing with some pretty large data sets. The working environment was great too, as we were a small, almost start-up like team within Microsoft.

The other big change was that the Expo team was almost completely based in Redmond, whereas I was working from home in the UK. This worked out better than we hoped, and although I spent about two weeks in every eight out in Redmond, my quality of life has improved greatly as I no longer spend 4 hours every day commuting up to London from Hove.

I’m now working in the Live Search team, specifically on the Commerce team. I don’t think there could be a more exciting field to be working in at the moment in Microsoft than in Search as there is a fantastically talented bunch of people working really hard to try to beat an excellent competitor in Google. I’m still doing the 75%/25% split between home in the UK and the office in Redmond, and thankfully still enjoying doing that.

Technically, as you’d expect my focus is on building highly scalable web sites, so I suspect a lot of my posts will be on challenges in that area. For the last 6-9 months I had been working in C++ for the first time in about 15 years which was surprisingly fun in the end, but my current project is taking me back to C# and managed code (which I’m pretty happy about!)

However not everything will be directly work related, as I’m interested in most things online, in particular Windows Live services, and even more specifically location based services. I’ve a few side projects I’m currently working on that I hope to share on here when I’ve made more progress.

I think that’s enough about me for now – hopefully my next post will be a little more useful!