I’m two weeks shy of six months at Microsoft. When I arrived here I was immediately thrown into the fray on Project Silk. The primary developer on the project was heading into paternity leave. Fortunately, I had read JavaScript: The Good Parts on my flight out to Redmond. (I had no idea that I’d be diving deep into JavaScript.)

After Silk, I um, got to work on some other cool stuff that propelled me even deeper in the HTML5/JavaScript world.

After hours, I started playing with NodeJS. Specifically, spiking out some play-by-post dorky goodness inspired by the efforts of my buddy Drew Miller using Express, Mongo, and Expresso.

I’ve really enjoyed jumping back deep into JavaScript. This is a return for me in many ways. Back in the late 90s I was doing classic ASP development and I had settled on JScript over VBScript. (I had even begun writing an ORM in JScript, though I had no idea what an ORM was or just how deep the water can get. I just knew that I was tired of writing the same thing over and over.) I was also spending a lot of time with Flash and ActionScript back then. In fact, the Flash community was were I first encountered the MVC pattern. It was also the place where I first began learning about object-oriented programming.

Working at Microsoft has been a wonderful experience so far and I’m especially fond of my team here at p&p. It is a different perspective being on the inside. I’m excited about the opportunities to produce quality guidance. I’m also glad to help encourage trends here that I believe are helpful both to the company and the community.

As a bonus, these first six months here in Redmond have been beautiful weather.

My next project is exploring the mobile web. This is a crazy, active, and vibrant area at the moment. There’s a lot for me to learn. Fortunately, we value transparency here in p&p and I intend to post frequently about my projects.