Another year bites the dust

I’m taking some time off this month from work, and think I’ll take a break from blogging too until 2011 (I reserve the right to change my mind if something really interesting comes up). It’s been a pretty good year for me, but as I reflect, it was a busy year too. Here are some highlights.

I began the year by blogging about my first 15 years at Microsoft (part 5 is here). I knew at the time that I was going to leave my position in Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence group, but didn’t know where. In the end, I had several offers, including a few that would have had me leave Microsoft.

However, by the end of February, I had a new office, and a new job in the Office Communicator (now Lync) team. I’ve had a blast on this team and have enjoyed every minute of it.

In April, I gave a STAR keynote for the first time. The talk seemed to go well, and the feedback form comments and scores (9.1/10) were all positive.

Over the summer, I took a short vacation with my family to Toulouse, France. At least I planned for it to be short, but when we got to our house, it was so nice that we decided to stay – for almost a month. I worked for the last two weeks from Toulouse and had a good experience learning how to work remotely. I was hit with some bad news the day before we returned home. My dad had a stroke (his second) and was hit pretty hard.  I spent most of the next two months commuting the 100 miles between Microsoft and my parent’s house helping out where I could and delving deeper into the world of remote work (fortunately, I work on a product that makes it easy to do this).

In October, I did a brief North American tour and hit Portland for PNSQC, then Toronto for TesTrek. I also gave two informal webinars: one on test strategy, and another rehashing my PNSQC talk (video here)

Microsoft Lync also shipped in October – my first shipping product in six years. Overall, not a bad year. There’s plenty more that I did – and a ginormous amount of things I wanted to do but didn’t get a chance. I hope that 2011 brings even more challenges, fun, and opportunities for success.

More in January.

Comments

  1. Enjoyed your blog as well.

    Sad to hear about your father.

    Have a nice christmas holiday.

    Looking forward to reading more interesting articles here in 2011.

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