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Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
It really couldn't come at a better time with MIX and SxSW coming up so soon. I'm moving into a new role as the Central Region Rich Internet Application Architect Evangelist. I'm leaving the Heartland in the VERY capable hands of Brian Prince. (See his announcement called Farewell)
So, what does that mean?
I'm going to be broadening my geography and focusing in on a technology stack. I'll be covering all of the center of the United States with a heavy focus on Rich Internet Applications and partners.
In this technical and business development role,I get the opportunity to combine my passion for Rich Internet Applications and pragmatic business experience to help consulting shops, design firms and customers in their pursuit of the Microsoft stack in the web space. That includes broad responsibility for evangelizing the complete Microsoft platform with heavy emphasis on Silverlight, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, Expression, and ASP.NET AJAX.
I've been asked by a lot of my friends that I've made over the past year at Microsoft if I'm abandoning Heartland and if they are going to see me again. This is the typical pattern where someone does well as an evangelist and then moves off to Redmond and nobody sees them again. That's not the case here. I'm staying in Michigan. I'm not moving to Redmond and don't have plans for for the foreseeable future. I am tightening my focus so I'm not going to be all over the District covering anything and everything Microsoft related. However, I will be heavily involved in helping grow the community and partners that are in my chosen technology stack. Actually, a lot of my job will be business development with my partners so I will be seeing (or at least communicating with) a lot of you a lot more often.
Most people that I've talked to have said that it makes sense for me as most of my posts and activities lately have been in this realm anyway. I'm just officially getting permission to follow my passions and do the work that I want to do. I'll be working very closely with Chris Bernard, Don Burnett, Jeff Blankenburg, Larry Clarkin, Adam Kinney, Scott Barnes and more! It also means that I'll get to more things like the Phizzpop Design Challenge only I'm hoping to bring my own flair to them now that it's officially part of my job.
If you have any questions at all or would like to work with me on something, feel free to email me at myfirstname.lastname (at) myplaceofemployment.com - please read that and decipher as my first name is Josh, last is Holmes and I work at Microsoft. :)