The last several months have seen a lot of big changes in my life. 

<strong>Week 1</strong>

So week 1 was very busy. I flew into Redmond to kick-off my new job by starting with new employee orientation (NEO) and then meet with the team during the rest of the week. My initial plan was to spend most of the week in Redmond and then fly over to Vegas to for Microsoft MIX. That kind of changed a little. :)

I've worked at several companies during my career but I've never been through a new employee orientation as comprehensive as what Microsoft provides. Being new to a company is always a challenge since you have to figure out the who's, what's and where's of an organization. It's tough enough to do this when you're in a small company but when you're part of an 100k employee behemoth, not having a formal process can make it virtually impossible to learn your way around. Thankfully, Microsoft's NEO program is a saving grace as it runs you through important things such as benefits, corporate access, important internal assets and the value of networking. Amazingly, they do all of this within 1 day and it's very thorough. I kept thinking how my wife, who is incredibly organized, would totally love this whole process.

During NEO, I was in a room with about 50 other new employees, which is always satisfying since it shows that the company is growing. And despite the many (mis)perceptions I hear, these new employees were just like many other professionals and not some borg-like robot. Many of them were back as rehires at Microsoft and had nothing but great things to say about their previous experiences. 

Post-NEO, I was in a number of meetings getting to know many of the people I'll work with and also networking with other teams. Networking is serious business at Microsoft and an important part of being successful there. With so many people working on many different projects, it's incredibly important to know who is a stakeholder in which project. This will help narrow down whom to contact if you need some help. One of the takeaways from this is that there are an insane amount of REALLY smart people working at Microsoft. I was privy to seeing some things that made me say "wow, I didn't know Microsoft was working on that!". I constantly tell people not to rule Microsoft out (as so many people tend to do) and what I saw validated my thoughts completely.

In addition, I got to have some 1:1 time with my leadership team. Spending time with them helped me learn a little bit more about where their focus is and how it will help shape my role. It's a strong team which I can learn from but also a team with high expectations.

Two people that I met that I think will have a very important impact on my role are Cyra Richardson and Chris Wilson. Cyra has been with Microsoft for 20 years and I was amazed by her breath of knowledge. I'm really glad that she kind of took me under her wing to show me the ropes. Her help and guidance is proving to be invaluable. The other person is Chris Wilson of Internet Explorer fame. Chris is a household name in the browser world and he graciously took the time to sit with me and give me an overview of what's happening with the Internet Explorer Developer Tools. His team is doing some very important things to make debugging client-side apps much easier and I'm happy to be able to go to him for the scoop.

The last thing I'll say about the Microsoft campus is that it is HUGE! I've been to Google (thx Dion) and thought it was big but it pales in comparison to Microsoft. Microsoft occupies so many buildings that it has its own shuttle service to allow employees to easily travel between buildings. Seriously, you need to see it to believe it.

<strong>Week 2: Microsoft Mix</strong>

I was originally slated to fly into Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX conference on Sunday but that changed when I was asked by Microsoft's marketing team to leave on Friday to help shore up the messaging about of Microsoft contributing code to the jQuery JavaScript Library. Being part of the jQuery project team, they wanted my feedback to ensure that it was consistent with what the jQuery team was expecting. It was great to see how concerned Microsoft was about ensuring that their efforts were construed in the right way by the jQuery community and that the contributions were following the jQuery team's guidelines (not their own). I think many people look at OSS contributions from Microsoft with a wary eye but in this case, I saw a genuine desire to do something for the good of the jQuery community. Had I seen anything different, I would've raised a red flag as the jQuery community is incredibly important to me.

The prep work for the conference itself is something to behold. I was able to go backstage to see the "control room" which consisted on racks and racks of monitors and servers, all powering either demos or some other important piece of the conference. It's a rare view into the inner-workings of a big conference. And big it is as MIX is one of Microsoft's two biggest developer conferences (PDC being the other). With 3,000 developers showing up, there was a lot of moving parts that needed to get in sync including 4 movie theater-sized screens that were used for the keynotes. 






