I\u2019m taking some time off this month from work, and think I\u2019ll take a break from blogging too until 2011 (I reserve the right to change my mind if something really<\/u> interesting comes up). It\u2019s been a pretty good year for me, but as I reflect, it was a busy year too. Here are some highlights.<\/p>\n
I began the year by blogging about my first 15 years at Microsoft (part 5 is here<\/a>). I knew at the time that I was going to leave my position in Microsoft\u2019s Engineering Excellence group, but didn\u2019t know where. In the end, I had several offers, including a few that would have had me leave Microsoft. <\/p>\n However, by the end of February, I had a new office<\/a>, and a new job<\/a> in the Office Communicator (now Lync) team. I\u2019ve had a blast on this team and have enjoyed every minute of it.<\/p>\n In April, I gave a STAR keynote<\/a> for the first time. The talk seemed to go well, and the feedback form comments and scores (9.1\/10) were all positive. <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 for almost a month. I worked for the last two weeks from Toulouse and had a good experience learning how to work remotely<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n In October, I did a brief North American tour and hit Portland for PNSQC<\/a>, then Toronto for TesTrek. I also gave two informal webinars: one on test strategy<\/a>, and another<\/a> rehashing my PNSQC talk (video here<\/a>)<\/p>\n