March marked five years since I joined the brilliant folks at Wintellect, and one year since the company was acquired by Atmosera. It also marked the moment when I made the difficult choice to resign and take on new challenges by becoming a Hubber. That’s right — I joined the DevOps FastTrack team at GitHub! If you follow me on LinkedIn, then you may already know!
Wintellect was an incredible experience and a team of some of the smartest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work beside. They helped me to improve on multiple levels, as a person and a technologist. During my time, I was able to participate in one of the largest Azure migrations, help Microsoft Research to advance both academia and Azure (data sharing!), work with petabyte scale datasets, and scaled a cloud solution to support more than 10K concurrent users (in a system that could jump from nothing to peak in just a few minutes). The work I did generally pushed the boundaries of my technical and sales skills. I also had the pleasure of joining both the ALM | DevOps Rangers and Azure MVP programs, with my leadership and co-workers coaching me into an active speaker and member of the community. At the same time, my peers helped me to go even deeper into Azure, Kubernetes, web development, and more. Throughout my tenure, I had a team making sure I was successful and managers/owners that supported and guided my growth.
Each of my successes was the result of the hard work and the collaboration within this company, the opportunities we created together, and the close teamwork. Nobody knows everything, and you can’t do everything on your own. So, we worked together to build and support everyone. Eventually, I had the opportunity to give back to the growing team as the Consulting Director (and later, VP of Professional Services). In these roles I also had the advice, guidance, experience, and support that helped me to mature and grow as a leader.
It was a once in a lifetime experience and I’ll forever be grateful to everyone involved for their ongoing friendships, our time together on this journey, the wealth of knowledge, and the devotion to continuous improvement. Now, I look forward to the next chapter of my life and contributing to the success of customers as a Hubber. I’m incredibly excited to become part of a team made up of people that I’ve admired for years, and I’m looking forward to our new challenges together!
Because I’m joining GitHub, I will be exiting the Microsoft MVP program to make way for someone else to join. That program is intended to support those people outside of Microsoft that are making a difference for developers. It’s an amazing program, and the community managers do an incredible job of supporting everyone involved. Of course, exiting doesn’t mean I won’t remain in the community. It just means I’ll be working to support the MVPs and the community from a different position. You can’t get rid of me that easily! 😉
In that regards, we are all starting on a new path in my DevOps journey together. I can’t wait to see what we create together!