HelloBlog()
In fine programming tradition, I'll open this blog with a familiar lexicon!
So hi! My name is Howard Dierking and I am the product planner for developer and database certifications at Microsoft Learning. I joined Microsoft about 4 months ago after about a 10 year long career in software development. As I'm sure you can conclude, this role is a pretty significant change for me - but hopefully good for you. One thing that I sincerely hope to bring to certifications at Microsoft is my perspective as a developer. I want to see our exams and certifications grow increasingly relevant to you, both as hiring managers and as developers seeking to validate your skills. In my career thusfar, I have been both - so hopefully some of that experience will seep into the products we are creating.
That said, because I still am a developer at heart, I will also blog about new cool programming things that I learn in my spare time (yea - like I have any of that!). I am very into agile methodology, TDD, and NHibernate - just to name a few. I will try to categorize posts, however, so that those of you who either don't care about cert news or those of you who don't care about tech stuff can view accordingly.
If you have any thoughts, concerns, questions, rants...whatever, please drop me a note and I will make sure to follow up!
Well, I suppose that's enough for a first post. Cheers!
I am currently the Editor-in-Chief for MSDN Magazine. I joined Microsoft in 2006 as a product planner with the certification team at Microsoft Learning. Prior to that, I spent my career as a developer and later as an architect. My main technology passions include pretty much anything on language theory, agile development, and service-oriented architecture.
