Thanks for all the fish!
One of my favourite things about working for this company is the interaction I get to have with all of you, the end users, the developers, the IT professionals, the knowledge workers and so forth. In fact, over the least two or three years, I’ve been working hard to make that more part of my daily life here as a tester on Visual Web Developer. But, being a tester, I have a primary task, and interacting with the community wasn’t it. And trust me, I tried as hard as I could to make it my primary task.
But, a few weeks ago, Brian Goldfarb, a Lead Product Manager for Developer Marketing sent me a link to a job he had open, the Product Manager for Internet Explorer. After reading through the job description, I knew it was something that I wanted to do. It’s a career that lets me interact with the developer community on a much more regular basis, and find ways to make IE better, enable our developers to have richer development experience.
Brian recruited Keith Smith, our former test manager to come work for him last October as the Product Manager for Visual Web Developer, so making this role change wasn’t something that is unheard of. I used it as a great opportunity to talk to Keith, Brian, and several of Brian’s other direct reports. After learning more about the role and getting a good introduction to Internet Explorer, I decided to take the plunge and formally ask for permission. I felt kind of bad doing it, as our new test manager, the guy who replaced Keith, had just started. In fact, I asked for permission to interview on his first day on the job!
And that brings us to today. I’m closing down on my test responsibilities and getting ready to leave the team. It’s something that is bitter sweet. I’ve enjoyed working with a group of extremely smart people. Each one of them has something great to offer, and is fun to work with. I’m going to miss those guys. Tomorrow is my last day on the team, though we “celebrated” (is that the right word?) that last Friday with a small party out in one of the sports fields.
SideStory: Right before I cut the cake, Vinay (our test manager) and Brad (one of the dev managers) decided it would be fun to spray me with some champagne. The last time I had a champagne fight was just after we shipped VS2002, so it was over due. Thankfully, they didn’t get me too bad, and it was a warm day, so it dried pretty quickly. I set about cutting the cake, a really nice chocolate cake (anybody see where this is going). I cut the first piece, put it on a plate, turned around and ran at Vinay, covering his face with a piece of chocolate cake. Revenge is sweet (mmmmm, chocolate icing)!
What isn’t going to change is you, the community I’m going to be dealing with is very similar, it’s the web designers, the add-in developers and other web developers. So stick around, the content on my blog likely won’t change much, I’m still going to be dealing with HTML, CSS, but now I’ll likely be adding more Jscript, and even some plug in stuff. I’d love to hear from you want you want to know about! What’s missing in the documentation, what bugs didn’t we fix in IE7 that you want fixed in future versions, and so forth.
If you’ve not checked out IE7 yet, I also encourage you to do that! It’s been a while, but we’re finally bringing the browser into the 21st century! Another great place to get some more info is the IE blog! They’ve done some great work there to spread the info about their team, and all the great stuff they’re working on!