I'm excited to be embarking on a new adventure as a Cloud Developer Advocate in the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft.

Here are the highlights of this post:

  • I accepted a role as a Cloud Developer Advocate with Microsoft in the legendary Scott Guthrie's org
  • I'll be working for an awesome tech leader, Jeff Sandquist (leading the recent docs.microsoft.com re-imagining, and web experiences)
  • I'm working remote (aka happy family)
  • I'll continue to be very engaged in the Angular/Node/JavaScript communities
  • I'll continue to speak at events like ngConf, workshops, creating learning materials, samples, blog posts, and engaging with the community.
  • I'll be using these technologies on their own and making them do awesome things in Azure
  • We're looking for great folks to join the team in many technology communities
  • We're hiring like mad

You can read one of the job descriptions here. Here is a portion from it:

The mission of the Cloud Developer Advocacy team is to win the hearts and minds of Developers and IT Operators to secure the future of the platform. The Cloud Developer Advocacy team is first and foremost pivoted on enabling a healthy ecosystem for technical communities targeting Azure. Each team maps to a set of Azure services and open source technologies relevant to that technical audience. We will be opportunistic and hire for capability rather than by geography, we will still ensure we have great coverage in the United States and key WW geographies including London, Bangalore, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv.

I'll share my interpretation of this and why I joined. Being very clear here ... these are my own personal thoughts on the role, as a candidate and soon to be member of the team.

We start with the main appeal of the role.

... win the hearts and minds of Developers ...

This is one of the strategies that Microsoft did well for years. Appeal to the developers. Make it fun. Make it productive. Make it powerful. Listen to the community and customers. This appeals to me because I love helping others succeed and have fun.

Next, we learn the business value.

... enabling a healthy ecosystem for technical communities targeting Azure ...

This makes sense. There has to be business value. Help developers help themselves and help them use Azure. I like that this is clear. I encourage everyone when consdiering a position to understand the value to the business.

Does this mean we have to know everything about Azure? Not likely. I sure don't. We learn more here ...

Each team maps to a set of Azure services and open source technologies relevant to that technical audience.

Ah! So the role targets folks strong in various OSS communities where Azure may benefit them. If it's OSS it could be .NET, Java, Python, JavaScript, DevOps, security ... just about any area in OSS that could use a cloud feature. So we know the breadth of the focus is wide. Good, because I love the web and mobile :)

Then we learn about one of the criteria the hiring manager will consider.

... hire for capability rather than by geography ...

OK, I'm all behind this. Find the right people first, then worry about geography. For me, this was huge as we live on the east coast of the USA.

So why am I sharing all of this? Well, there are two reasons. First, I am excited about this new challenge. I'll be doing what I'm passionate about with the web and mobile and helping others use these technologies on their own and with Azure. Second, we're building a team. If you have a skill and passion around developer advocacy, then maybe it's a fit for you too.