I'm joining Microsoft

I'm excited to announce that I'm joining Microsoft as a Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate in the Cloud and Enterprise group!

In a seriously ego-boosting Twitter DM, Donovan Brown asked whether I'd be interested in the role and encouraged me to apply. I went through the process, and I'll be starting on his team next week, on the 7th of June.

What about Octopus?

I joined Octopus Deploy early in 2015 as a Solution Architect. When I joined, I was one of only six in the company, but since then the company has grown to about 25 and my role started revolving more around the community. I also wrote our extension for Visual Studio Team Services.

I love Octopus, and leaving wasn't in the plan at all, but this new opportunity was far too good to pass up. I consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with such a dedicated and smart group of people for over 2 years. I have no doubt that Octopus will continue pushing out awesome software.

While Octopus occupies a commanding position in the world of deployment automation, Microsoft (through VSTS and Azure) has a set of tools and services for the whole DevOps lifecycle. I'm looking forward to talking to a broader audience about everything from requirements gathering to monitoring in production.

However... you can still expect me to recommend Octopus as part of that process. :)

What will I be doing?

It's been made clear to me that my goal at Microsoft is to help people succeed. Not to help them succeed with a Microsoft-only stack. Not even to help them succeed with a mainly Microsoft stack. If Microsoft tech can be used anywhere in the pipeline, I'll try to help out.

This is really important to me, and is another example of Microsoft putting their money where their mouth is. Gone are the days of Microsoft lock-in - today it's all about competing on merit, enabling any platform, and open-source. The Microsoft of ten years ago didn't excite me, but that's changed dramatically.

As for my day to day, you can expect to see me at more conferences and events. I'll be creating useful content to help people succeed, and hopefully visiting a few customers directly. It'll take me a little while to settle in, but feel free to reach out on Twitter if there's something I can help with.

Microsoft is hiring, so if you have a passion for developer advocacy, maybe you'd be a good fit as well!