Nathan's Occasional Blog

What a long day.  Today I closed a chapter in my career and started writing the next.

As many of you know for the last 4+ years I’ve been on (or leading) the ops team for the Windows Live (aka MSN) Messenger server platform.  In the last year we’ve also launched the Windows Notification Service that powers live tiles and messages delivered to modern apps on Windows 8.  And oh by they way we’ve also leveraged our Messenger platform to power Skype. 

What a wild ride and a lot of work.  I’m both incredibly proud of the products we’ve delivered and continually humbled by the amazing talent that I get to call my friends and peers at work.  I want to extend a huge thanks to everyone on the Messenger/WNS team for making the last 4 years so enjoyable, especially Seth and Curtis for giving me a shot at it in the first place and mentoring me along the way.  I’ve made some great friendships that I will always cherish.

That being said, the great news is that I’m not going too far!  Moving forward I’ll be leading the service engineering team powering the address book, account profile, and social network feeds that light up your Microsoft Account across nearly every major property and device Microsoft offers. 

No pressure. 

But between now and Monday I’m a free man! I’m not on call for my old team, I’m not ramped up on my new team, and I’ve unsubscribed from all the email lists I don’t need to be on anymore. I don’t think my phone will know what to do without all those emails flooding in. Time to relax and celebrate my son’s first birthday this weekend! 

Onwards and upwards to new challenges!