Moving from Search to Apps

For the last seven years, since I joined Fast Search & Transfer in 2005, search technology has been my core interest and expertise. It has been a fun journey, bringing me from Melbourne to San Francisco, via Amman and Paris. But just as rewarding, is the journey from novice to expert – from seeing search as “black box” magic, to presenting search technology at conferences like TechEd and The SharePoint Conference.

But, there is a time for everything. And as Office 2013 is appearing, making search more accessible to everyone than ever before, I am leaving the stage. I was lucky enough to be offered a new position here at Microsoft, this time in the group named “Developer Platform Evangelism”. Here, I will be a Technical Evangelist, focusing on helping developers build great apps for Windows 8.

This new role looks like it will fit perfectly with my interests and skills. Design and user interfaces have always been a very interesting topics in my view. At the same time, “Once a developer, always a developer” – nothing is like opening your favorite editor, writing a few lines of code, compile, run and then viewing your creation come alive on the screen. It was great fun with Basic on my Commodore 64, and is way more elegant and intuitive using JavaScript or C# to create blazing apps for Windows 8.

While I will still reply to the odd search question now and then, I look forward to engaging with a new community. Hopefully, I will also gain insights that I find worth sharing on this blog. And if you have any question related to Windows 8 apps, whether it’s how to get started, design discussions or how to get published in the Windows store – please reach out to me, and I will doing whatever I can to help you out.

Thanks for ride, and come join the next wave – Windows 8!

Have a great day everyone!