Last week I’ve announced that my last day at Chef was approaching (in 10 more days). I can’t begin to say enough good things about my experiences at Chef. I’ve been very blessed with my last series of jobs, from Edgenet to Stack Overflow to Chef. Each role has enabled me to grow and share my learnings.

Today, I can share with you what my next role will be.

Here Comes The Cloud

I’m joining Microsoft as a Cloud Developer Advocate on Donovan Brown’s team focused on DevOps scenarios.

What’s a Cloud Developer Advocate?

Here’s a bit of the job posting (with some comments from me).

The mission of the Cloud Developer Advocacy team is to win the hearts and minds of Developers and IT Operators to secure the future of the platform.

The first thing I’d like to call out is “hearts and minds of Developers and IT Operators”. In talking to Jeff Sandquist (the GM responsible for the CDA program and docs.microsoft.com too) about the role, one thing that came up was the difference in messaging that Microsoft has had towards “IT Pros” and developers. That situation is changing. With the focus on DevOps, the lines are blurring between these roles and technical resources are technical resources - regardless of your job title.

The Cloud Developer Advocacy team is first and foremost pivoted on enabling a healthy ecosystem for technical communities targeting Azure.

Next, I’d like to clarify this “healthy ecosystem” thing… Basically, rather than the historical Microsft approach of “buy all the things from us and use all our tooling”, the service model for Azure means that ~we~ (well, we in a few weeks) they have to repeatedly earn the right to be the solution for the customer. What this means for developer advocacy is that Microsoft Azure has to come to the places that developers are, and not just those building .NET with Visual Studio, and find ways Azure can make things better for them in a way that fits that community.

Each team maps to a set of Azure services and open source technologies relevant to that technical audience.

And since no one can know everything, different teams will focus on different tech communities and services in Azure. John Papa, one of my future co-workers, has a write up of why he went back to Microsoft for this role and his view of it.

What does that mean for me?

Since I’m going to be on Donovan’s team and we focus on DevOps scenarios, expect to see a lot on configuration management, containers, build pipelines, etc. Expect to hear “shift left” from me a lot. :)

I’ll still be quite active in the Chef community (Chef, Habitat, DevOps, and Azure will be a major focus areas for me).

I’m going to remain a maintainer for Chef, Habitat, and Test-Kitchen. I’ll continue to be contributing to various Chef cookbooks as well.

I’m sure some DSC and PowerShell will creep out too.

You’ll also see blogs, videos, and walk-throughs on how some of the features in Azure can make your workflow easier.

On the flip side, I’ll be your voice to Azure engineering. I want to know what is hard or flat out doesn’t work. And when I find one of those hard use cases, I can help build some walk-throughs or helpers or samples that can help with the challenge.

To steal a quote from my teammate to be Damian Brady:

It’s been made clear to me that my goal at Microsoft is to help people succeed. Not to help them succeed with a Microsoft-only stack. Not even to help them succeed with a mainly Microsoft stack. If Microsoft tech can be used anywhere in the pipeline, I’ll try to help out.

Anything else?

If this sounds good to you, the broader Cloud Developer Advocate program is hiring like mad.