TL; DR
I’ll be starting at Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Graph in January. This is an exiting change and I’d like to take the time to thank 2toLead for the amazing last few years.
New role
I’m exited to announce I’ll be starting at Microsoft in January as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Graph (and other Microsoft Identity Platform topics). I’ll be part of the MIP organization and in the extended team of brilliant people like Yina Arenas, Jeremy Thake, Darrel Miller and many more.
This is truly exiting and humbling to join the team working on the Microsoft Graph. For the readers not familiar with the name: the Microsoft Graph is the unified API for Microsoft 365 services, enabling organizations and developers to tap into the wealth of data and knowledge they are creating over the years.
The API has come a long way since its early days under the name of the “Office 365 unified APIs” and I do believe it has had a tremendous impact on Microsoft’s transformation from a products company to a services and API first company.
It is also a change of trade for me, moving from core development to leading teams of developers and designing great solutions for our customers.
Thank you 2toLead
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank 2toLead for these amazing last 3 years together. I joined as employee number 7 and I am now moving on to a new role from a team of 27 dedicated and talented people.
Not only the culture of remote work has helped me maintain a healthy work-life balance, they make a point to work on bleeding edge projects with noticeable customers. I am pretty sure the mentoring as well as the extended support for community activities are big factors that contributed to me getting this new opportunity.
If you’d like to join 2toLead, do not hesitate to contact Kanwal Khipple on LinkedIn. The company is currently hiring Project Leads, Developers and more.
What about your community involvements?
Most of my community contributions over the last years revolved around Azure DevOps, SharePoint Framework development, Azure development and of course the Microsoft Graph.
I think that will shift to focus on the Microsoft Graph, API design, maybe protocol and standards advocacy (HTTP, Odata, OpenAPI…) and I’ll try to keep some involvement in the local Montréal community as well.
I already blogged in the past about how personal blogs are becoming less relevant in an era of open source development and when great platforms such as stack overflow exist. I’ll probably be blogging on some of the official Microsoft blogs in the future, which means this blog site might transition to other things like my experience working at Microsoft maybe.
Are you moving to Redmond?
No. Our life is in Montréal and I do not see us moving anywhere else anytime soon. Part of my engineering team might be in Nairobi or India anyway. This means I’ll be traveling a little bit and I’ll still be able to have a beer/tea/hot chocolate with the local community members in Montréal.
Weren’t you involved in an IoT thing?
Yes. Part of the great culture of 2toLead is that they are willing to give you personal time for other projects you might have.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine named Dany started an IoT company with the goal to help customers to optimize energy usage related to climate control. Think of datacenters and frozen products distributors (any frozen pizza, or ice cream you buy transitions through them) that need to cool things down. These industrial systems are still mostly designed without any embedded intelligence and there is a huge opportunity for energy and costs optimization.
Dany reached out multiple times to request help with a few things, like the data pipeline, building the API, setting the foundation of a dashboard portal, authentication and authorization.
Earlier this year SenseAI was acquired by Bases.AI, a company focused on datacenters and AI. And I am sure they have all cards in hand to start a revolution around data, AI and energy management.
They are hiring developers (front end and back end), if you feel like working with this great team, do not hesitate to contact Dany on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to know more about the kind of things they do, you can watch our Microsoft Build session, although the examples were built for the demonstrations, most of the concepts are very similar.
What about the MVP program?
You cannot be a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional anymore if you work for Microsoft. This is a page turning. The program allowed me to make lots of friends passioned about technology and community. I’ll keep many great memories (some of them are blurry, I blame the lemon drops) and if you contribute a lot to the community, you should definitively join the program.