I’ve recently accepted a job with the Channel 9 team (working for Jeff and working with Adam, Erik, Robert, and Charles), and … because I’m mostly a one-job kind of guy, that means I have to stop working at MSDN. So, come January 16th, I’ll be over in a new office at Channel 9, probably not coding anything yet as it always take a few days to get ramped up, connected to the right source trees, etc…

This is quite a big move for me, even though it is still within Microsoft. I joined the company back in 1999, working as a MCS consultant up in Winnipeg, MB, and then I moved down to Redmond in 2001 to join the MSDN article writing team. Since then I may have moved around a bit in terms of role (Writer, Content Strategist, Developer), but I stayed with the same group for the last four and a half years. As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to make a change; you get very comfortable working with the same people on the same issues, in the same offices, even the same source trees and server names. I think that, as much as I have enjoyed the last year, even my move to the MSDN development team was a bit of cold-feet about leaving MSDN. I had decided that it was time to make a change and try out a different role within Microsoft, but it seemed so much safer, so much more familar to find another position that was still within MSDN.

Now it is a year later, and some might say I still am not making that big of a change… it is still Microsoft, it is still working on one of our web properties, it is still somewhat similar in its content/community focus (not that similar, but relatively so)… but in the ways that matter to me, it is a very big change. Channel 9 is a much smaller team, and their mix of content vs. community is tilted much farther towards the community side. Not that it necessarily means anything, but I certainly noticed that everyone on the Channel 9 team has a blog … which isn’t required for any team, but it does suggest certain attitudes and priorities…

I’m sure I can still write articles for MSDN (if I have time), although I might end up contributing some content to other sites as well. I still plan on talking about some of the work that has been done to build MSDN’s new web platform, including all the great work that will be done after I’ve left, but you can expect to start hearing more and more about the new work I’m doing at Channel 9 as well. I’ll do my best to make it all interesting to read 🙂

I suspect that some folks will connect this change with the recent departure of Brian Johnson, and the not so recent departure of Kent Sharkey… and I would be lying if I said there was absolutely no connection… but I am not leaving MSDN because they did… although I was starting to worry about who I would be going for coffee with each day. For at least a year, it was a near unbroken ritual for the three of us to make our latte runs together in the morning each day, and for the past few months Brian and I have done our best to continue on without Kent, but soon it would have just been me and that would have been weird. Now I guess I need to figure out who on my new team shares my caffeine addiction and develop some new rituals.