It’s now been a little over three months that I’ve been at Microsoft, and it’s been pretty engrossing.
Besides my daily commute (and having to cart around a ThinkPad, which is something I don’t think I’ll ever grow accustomed to), a lot more has changed.
Formally, I’m now a Data Solutions Architect, which means I spend a good deal of my time herding various kinds of elephants. Besides helping out with all sorts of networking and IaaS stuff, that is — something I know well and care about, but which I don’t find at all challenging these days (unless you’re talking about containers, of course).
And having meetings. Lots and lots of meetings, which (as regular readers will know) is somewhat of a mixed blessing. I’ve also taken to spending most of my evenings going through work e-mail and poking at various kinds of documentation (of which there is a tremendous amount to go through besides the stuff I’m interested in), so every Friday evening I take stock and wonder where all the time went.
It’s a lot of fun (I’m doing a number of deep-dives into machine learning, IoT and micro-services), but at the same time it’s such a profound shift that I find myself missing the simple things — coding, building working prototypes, spending a couple of hours reading papers that focus on tech rather than features.
That will come soon (hopefully), but right now it’s all I can do to catch up on Sushy and add IPython notebook support (as well as getting it to run under Cygwin, which required a few extra tweaks). With luck, I’ll find the time to switch to it soon and start posting about some interesting stuff you can do in the cloud.
In the meantime, I’ll be going to Seattle in a few days. As much as I hate flying I can’t really pass this up, so expect some jet-lagged rantings soon.