Lost In Tangent

When I joined the Microsoft family last month, they graciously allowed me to work remotely for a month while I handled all of my moving arrangements. Well that month has come and gone and I’m now sitting in the Tampa International Airport about to bid farewell to Florida. The funny thing is, I never realized just how much I was going to miss this place. When I first accepted the offer to move to Redmond, I was on cloud nine, and was ready to go immediately. Then reality kicked in and I started to think about the fact that I love hot weather and enjoy wearing flip-flops 365 days out of the year. I don’t even own any winter clothing and I’ve never driven in the snow before. The odds are pretty much against me in this situation.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with some amazing people over the years who have really helped me progress in my career. The Florida developer community is so potent, and full of life, and I’m very grateful for the time I was able to share with everyone I met. You won’t find any sappy stuff on this blog moving forward, but I’d like to take a moment to give some credit to a few people who have been especially pivotal for me:

Timothy Khouri - My best friend, and an all around awesome developer. I could always count on him to argue with me for hours about something so stupid and trivial. Those healthy challenges have helped me to be as studious and explicit as possible. Never speak in absolutes, don’t assume you’re right, and never underestimate someone else’s knowledge. If you’ve ever had a friend that would go skimboarding with you at eleven o’clock at night and quiz you on random software development questions in between runs, then you can understand just how good of a friend Timothy is.

Scott Auer - My previous boss, colleague, and friend. I thought I was a hot shot when I started working at MethodFactory, and Scott helped me to quickly realize just how inexperienced I was. I owe a lot of who I am as a professional today to Scott. Working with him was a great three years.

Stan Schultes - Stan is pretty much world-renound in the .NET community, and I was very fortunate to work in the same city as him. He was a great mentor to me and really helped me in my endeavors to get more involved in the developer community. Stan is such an awesome and giving person. If you ever get a chance to hang out and have a beer with him, take it, you’ll have a great time.

Now that I’m starting the “next chapter” of my life, I look forward to meeting and working with a whole new slew of people.

Goodbye Florida, it was fun. Let’s do it again sometime.

I have been roped into the Twitterverse by my colleague and good buddy Drew Robbins. If you wanna get in on all the action, add me.

So for those who don’t know already, I have taken a job at Microsoft. I will be acting as the technical evangelist for the .NET framework and Visual Studio. It was a hard decision to make since I was very happy at my current company (MethodFactory, who rock by the way), but the position represented a great oppurtunity for me to be involved in some really cool things. The team I’m on includes some rediculously smart and awesome people (Brian Keller, Justin Smith, Vittorio Bertocci, James Conard, Ryan Dunn, David Aiken, Drew Robbins).

I will be focusing on the features encompassed within the upcoming ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions that was spoken about by Scott Guthrie. As such you can expect to see lots of material posted by me around Astoria, ASP.NET MVC, the Entity Framework, etc. in coming months.

I would love to get some feedback on specific scenarios/features that people would like to see covered. Obviously ScottGu has done a good amount of coverage around the MVC space and I won’t be repeating what he has already said. The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions are chocked full of a TON of cool stuff though, so there is plenty of awesome things to talk about.

You can email me at joncart at microsoft dot com.

Stay tuned