It’s official: I’m not "The New Guy" any more.
After two years and change, I’m passing the mantle to our newest developer evangelist, Frédéric Harper, whose first official day on the job is today (I’m still there, but now it’s my job to torment the new guy). Of the many ways one can kick off a brand new year, starting a new job, especially one as interesting, challenging and fun as being an evangelist at Microsoft, is certainly one of the better ones.
Fred is based in Montreal, where he blogs at A la Base {2} and is known as an open source guy, having worked with its vibrant PHP community with tools and technologies that those of you who eat, breathe and sleep the bash shell will find familiar: PHP, Perl, MySQL and PostgreSQL. That’s not all that different from my own experience, having worked open source from the PHP, Python and Ruby side of things. Also like me, he’s worked the .NET side of the fence, with stuff like ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server and so on. I think his perspective as a newcomer, open sourcer, Montrealer and francophone will be of great value to the team, and judging from the couple of times he’s joined us at TechDays (in Montreal and Winnipeg), I think he’ll fit in just fine.
Fred’s area of concentration is going to be web development. He’s going to be your go-to guy for Windows web technologies of all sorts, and he’s definitely your go-to guy if French is your primary language.
He’s going to be in town later this week to visit Microsoft Canada HQ in Mississauga, where he’ll go through the standard employee “onboarding” procedures, which include getting a security badge (hence the term “blue badge” for Microsoft full-time employees), filling out some TPS reports, getting his assigned gear (one of the best parts of this job – we get lots of toys) and having an exploding tracking chip implanted in his head, near the base of the skull.
(Oh, wait a minute: I think the tracking chip is one of those things we’re not supposed to talk about.)
Anyways: welcome aboard, Fred! I think you’ll like it here.