TL;DR: Microsoft offered me a position on the Windows Azure Service Bus team and I took it. I’m ex-Microsoft and I reclaim my blue badge on February 11, 2013.

Longer version: From 2000 to 2006, I worked at Microsoft on MSDN and later on Indigo (WCF). The family loved living in Washington state and I loved my job at Microsoft. However, my wife and I don’t ever want to look at life and see ourselves doing things that we know we will regret. One of the things we were starting to regret was not letting our kids get to know their extended family. In 2006, my wife and I chose to return to the Midwest so that our three children (then 10, 5, and 3 years old) could get to know their cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Since 2006, we’ve been able to attend graduations, weddings, and generally get to visit family whenever the spirit moved us. We got to know everyone in our extended family quite well. As happens quickly, the families have seen their kids get older, other activities occupy more of their time, and this has limited the ease in all of us getting together. Essentially, Thanksgiving works great- everything else is a crap shoot.

Over the last 2 years, getting together just got tougher, so my family reevaluated our goals and wants. We decided we wanted to go back to the Pacific Northwest and I figured that, if I’m going to move there, why not work for Microsoft again? One of the teams I was interested in was the Windows Azure Service Bus team. They had an opening and after a nice, long day of interviews, they decided to take a risk on an RD and Integration MVP. I really clicked with the team, so I accepted the offer. This choice also allows me to work on one of the largest scale systems in the world on a product that ships on an Internet cadence. I’m extremely excited about this opportunity and can’t wait to get into the code.

I plan to continue recording courses for Pluralsight on the weekends and evenings- the authoring/teaching bug bit me back in 1998. Pluralsight provides a great way to scratch that itch.