Celebrations
Back in January, I celebrated 5 years at Microsoft! It’s incredible how fast time can fly. I initially started working as a program manager II on Microsoft Graph Change Notifications (aka webhooks) and Change Tracking (aka delta queries). A transfer and a few promotions later I’m now a Principal Software Developer, working on Microsoft Graph client experiences (SDKs, kiota, copilot extensibility, OpenAPI…)
New role
After shipping so many products or new major versions, it’s time for me to take on new challenges. I’m soon going to start on the Azure OpenAI team. I’m hoping this new role will allow me to dive deeper into the innerworkings of HTTP with things like Server-Side events, streaming, etc. And of course, allow me to keep working on great open-source developer products!
Ongoing Open-Source work
This transition means that I need to make choices to maintain a manageable workload.
Starting today, I’ll be ignoring (as in GitHub ignore notification settings) anything under the Microsoft Graph organization.
I’ll also stop watching any kiota repository, I might start ignoring them in the future as well if I get mentioned too often.
I’ll keep an eye on BinkyLabs, std-uritemplate, and OAI. And of course, you’ll start seeing me contributing to new repositories 😊
Reflecting on past role
Learnings and growth
Co-founding and being the lead maintainer of kiota, an OpenAPI based client SDK generator, has been the highlight of my tenure on this team. It enabled a complete reboot of the SDK story for Microsoft Graph, built on partnerships with internal teams and industry leaders like Red Hat and GitHub, and federated a small but active community around it.
I’ve also had the opportunity to learn a lot about how standards and specifications are written, maintained. And learn about how communities are build around them through my involvement with the OpenAPI TDC (Technical Developer Community). Working with architects who designed t4 templates and OData has also been an incredible learning opportunity!
The scale Microsoft Graph operates at (client applications, requests, throughput, size of the API, number of teams involved…) has also been a great source of interesting puzzles to solve over the years.
Challenges
All that impact hasn’t been without challenges and setbacks.
My team grew from 7 to about 30+ developers, most of them located in Kenya. Our portfolio increased significantly to add Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility about 18 months ago, which required collaboration with teams located in China. The time difference, difficulty to create a one team culture, oversized portfolio, questionable management decisions and more created a perfect storm, hindering our ability to honour all our commitments. In that sense, I think I have failed the team by not investing enough in coaching others to grow technically.
The ongoing reorganizations also meant it’s been extremely hard to achieve team cohesion and operational efficiencies. I’m not sure what the learning could be here?
Due to budget restrictions, I haven’t traveled to conferences nearly as much as I used to for conferences. While this means I don’t get to see some people as often as I’d like to, I have to say I have not missed the airport/flights/hotels shenanigans.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m really excited about this new opportunity, and to meet my new teammates! I’ve reduced my social networks activity by a LOT over the last few years, but you can still follow me on Mastodon, LinkedIn and GitHub 😊