An Accordion, A New Addition, A Great Team and Big Challenges

[Cross Post From:  http://blogs.msdn.com/mark_relph]

I like to think I have one of the best jobs at Microsoft Canada. 

There is 2 equal reasons for that. 

• I am lucky enough to have an amazing group of people on my team (I’d go so far as to say the best group at Microsoft Canada).
• I love our team’s mission

What’s our mission, you ask?  There is a lot that falls into our portfolio (developers, IT pros, ISVs, Dev Tools Sales, Customer engagement, students and academic, startups, early adoption of technology, our platform, etc), but it can be easily summed up as:

1. Support Canada’s Technical Professionals by connecting with them and responding to their needs with outstanding programs, activities, interactions and content.
2. Help individuals, customers and our partners do amazing things with our software.  Maximize the effectiveness of the software they already have and ready them for the technology of the future.
3. In key strategic areas, make a significant positive impact on the Canadian marketplace.  This includes everything from improving our position as a web platform provider, to helping grow Canada’s “software economy”, to engaging with startups, to helping improve the position of Women in Technology.

It’s a huge undertaking, but our mission makes it easy for me to get out of bed in the morning and to love my job.  The only way we can meet our goals is to always have the best people working on those challenges.

As I said, I have an awesome team.  They simply rock - the technology evangelists behind our community connection blogs (like Rick, Christian, Rodney, John, Damir, Paul, Qixing, JL, Ruth or Pierre), our customer & partner evangelists (like David, Joel, Cigdem and Jamie), our sales crew (Adam, Mike, Jeff), our marketing experts (Wendy, Barnaby, Daniel and Rini), our “web and special projects” team (David and Jerome), my managers (Dean, John and Peter) – and of course my assistant Karen. 

But keeping an awesome team is a hard thing to do.  JL, for example, his heading to Redmond for his next challenge.  With every door that closes another window opens.  In his going away video, JL said if you are passionate about technology and passionate about helping Developers then you might be a good person to replace him.  Well, we found that person and he joins our team on Monday.

Joey deVilla is a well known member of Canada’s developer community.  He is likely best known as “the accordion guy”.

You can read Joey’s take on his new job here.

We are really excited to have him join our team and I think he brings a lot to the table:

• A genuine passion for technology
• Insight into the needs of developers
• A lot of non-Microsoft experience
• A lot of energy and ideas
• An accordion

So, watch for Joey at our events, on our blogs and in the community.

Joey – congratulations and welcome to the team.

Cheers,

Mark.

VP – Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Canada Co.