I used to be a blogger like you…

…until, well, you know. I realize it’s been quiet around here. Sorry about that.

At any rate, after about 18 months in the SQL engine, I’ve moved yet again. I think I gave a good run at it, but in the end I decided that it wasn’t working and that it was time to do something different. Ironically, I think the biggest reason SQL ended up not working out for me was something that the team decided to do right, namely going all-in on the cloud (i.e. SQL Azure). The problem was that when I originally joined the team, they weren’t quite there yet. The SQL organization was just starting to look beyond SQL Server 2012, all options were on the table, and one of those options was that the team might be willing to take a harder look at the language processing parts of the engine and their future. Then, about a month or so after I moved over the team coalesced around the decision to go all-in on the cloud and make SQL Azure the most amazing cloud data platform possible. And while I think that was totally the right call, it did mean that priorities got shifted and there just wasn’t going to be the kind of headroom to do the kinds of things that I was interested in doing. So instead I got to spend about a year and a half learning a lot of interesting things about the cloud and running a service in the cloud. But in the end, that’s not where my heart lay and so I decided to try something new.

Well, sort of new.

You see, I was chatting with some of my old compatriots back in the Developer Division (including some people I’d spent a lot of time working with on VB) and found that they were doing all kinds of interesting things with this weird little language that apparently a lot of people think sucks. It turns out that somewhere along the line this language that a lot of people think sucks somehow became this totally important language that lots of people were very, very interested in. And they were looking for some more people to work on it. And would I be interested? After thinking about it a bit, I decided that it could possibly be a lot of fun to work on a language that most people deride as a horrible language but which somehow is the crucial underpinning of lots of important things. (Reminded me of some stuff I worked on a few jobs back.) So I decided, why the heck not?

So, I’m now a newly-minted member of the Javascript team. Part of my job is just contributing in any way that’s useful to all the cool stuff that we’re already doing (yay Windows!). Part of my job is to do some looking forward as to where we might go with Javascript. After all, there’s lots of interesting things being done with Javascript beyond just running web pages.

So now you know.

You should also follow me on Twitter here.

One thought on “I used to be a blogger like you…

  1. Jim Wooley

    Reading through this I was hoping that you were talking about VBScript, but guessed it was probably JavaScript (or now TypeScript?) Anyway, glad to see you back where you belong.

    Reply

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