[restored from my Wordpress blog]

It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog-post. When I re-launched my blog on Azure Web Sites I just moved into a new team and a newly formed organization inside of Microsoft Corp.

That organization - DX TED (Developer Experiences, Technical Evangelism and Development) - was meant to bring the technical depth back to Microsoft’s evangelism unit. Indeed we were all moved to engineering roles (Program Managers, Software Development Engineers) since that was added as the main ingredient to the evangelism-parts of our role. At least speaking about DX Corp. I can say that mission is progressing at huge steps. I’ve spent more time in Visual Studio in the past 3 years than ever before since I left Microsoft Consulting Services back in 2011.

At that time, after being absent as a blogger for a while, I thought it is a good opportunity to re-start blogging. And given we were supposed to be the spearhead for Azure as a platform with Global Software Vendors I thought ‘how could it be better than running it on Azure’ … which I did and which is still the case. You’re reading a page served from Wordpress backed on Azure Web Apps with ClearDB MySQL on Azure.

Why quiet so long?

I think the strategy worked well in the first 1.5 years. But then my frequency of blogging reduced, again. It was mainly due to the principles I applied for my new blog, which were:

  • Publish something after we have achieved a major accomplishment with a partner.
  • Embrace a white-paper style of writing.
  • Back the post with some sort of a “reference implementation” as source code.
  • Provide that code with a script that automates the setup as far as possible.
  • Don’t talk about anything unfinished.

Based on those five principles, writing a blog-post mostly resulted in a larger piece of work for me. And my posts usually became very long, as well.

Also with those principles, posts were generally around how-to get things done with less focus on why we did things and what my personal opinions are around it.

A career-change…

Then last summer a change came across - I moved from working with medium-sized Global Software Vendors we generally called “enablers” to the Global Commercial Independent Software Vendors Group (GISV Commercial) inside of TED.

Organizationally someone could consider this as a side-step. But I consider that move as a huge next challenge! Because now I do have the pleasure to work on a dedicated basis with one of the largest Software Vendors of the world - SAP!

SAP might sound way to traditional for a personality like me - but it is not, actually. That company is changing rapidly and has became something different, already, since I left my former employer who was an SAP partner. They are anything else but old-school and traditional. They do a lot with new tech stuff including modern web technologies, modern app technologies (Cordova), cloud and much more… it is just so much that I am confronted with these days that I was carefully with broadly spreading that message after I’ve spent some time in the role. Now that I feel a bit settled I also feel more comfortable spreading that message a bit broader.

…that made me re-think blogging as well

The work with SAP also caused me thinking about changing my attitude towards blogging. With the principles I’ve established above, I realized that I could quit my blog, already, since there’s just so much going on with SAP.

Being the dedicated technical evangelist for SAP means a lot of coordination between engineering teams. It means facilitating, it means leading engineering teams of both sides into certain directions but it also means learning and being led by them into other directions.

It also means learning and digging into a lot of new technical stuff I haven’t even touched before. That includes SAP tech such as HANA, HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Gateway and Gateway for Microsoft, Fiori. But it also means broadening my technical capabilities on the Microsoft-side into Office 365 Add-In and App development, Windows 10 UWP app development, development of Cross-Platform Apps with Visual Studio Tools for Cordova and much more. Not to speak about all the Azure stuff. Sure, I need to specialize in a few things where I really become or stay deep (identity is still one of my favorites which I can make use of a lot in this alliance as well), but I at least need to get to a 200-level across all of those which are relevant for our alliance and work.

Thinking about that means there’s not much time for blogging based on the principles I do have established about 4 years ago. That won’t just work… therefore I throw them all away and replace them with the following principles:

  • Share more personal thoughts about both, Microsoft and SAP tech.
  • Develop ideas and get feedback through this blog.
  • Evolve and grow technical information through multiple posts instead of one long post.

To be honest - I don’t know if it will work and how it will work out. But I’ll definitely try it, increase my cadence of blogging with those new principles and hence share much more (hopefully) valuable information for you as far as possible…