There have been quite a lot going on in my life the past months, following the timeline of the events:
Most importantly, my wife gave birth to a healthy and beautiful son, named Baptiste. He is already quite tall and is wearing 3 month cloth after only 1 month of life :).
Few weeks before, I learned that my office in Zurich was shutting down and that my job was relocated in Redmond / Washington.
My wife and I planned to move to Redmond in a few years but with the unexpected closure of the Zurich development center we decided to take a shortcut in our plan and to accept the relocation offer. The decision was not too hard to take and I must say that I am super existed to be working in the mothership of Microsoft. Although Zurich is a beautiful city that offers incredible life quality I was never able to get myself to the Swiss German culture, probably because I am so Swiss Frenchy :).
The most annoying part of this move will be to get so far away of my family and friends but as I learned from previous experience friendship is not a link that can be broken by long distance.
The current plan is to have my family and me moving to Redmond in end of June 2011. So until then I will enjoy having team meeting in the middle of the night with my new team :).
I am stepping down as the ‘User Group Manager’ of the Adobe User Group Geneva. It was a great time for me being a UGM, Adobe really cares about us and the community, I have an incredible collection of Adobe’s T-Shirt :p.
I’m very proud of the growth of AUGG, we started in November 2006 with 5 members, today we are around 80 members. I had the opportunity to meet some of the best developers and designers from Geneva and the ‘Romandie’, participating to great meeting (the best one must have been the venue of Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow) and also had some hangover ;)
I resigned from my current role at MBA-Exchange.com & Careernomics.com, where I had also a great time and a great first full time professional experience.
Now I’m moving, early August, to Zurich, Switzerland biggest city with around 1,5 millions inhabitants :)
I have been enrolled at Microsoft (Unified Communication) as a ‘Software Development Engineer in Test’, which is an entry position in Microsoft empire. I’m really looking forward to all the knowledge I’ll be able to gather there and working with the team. I have already started learning C# and Visual Studio 2008 and my first impression is to enter in a serious coding experience :)
Thanks to everyone from the AUGG and thanks to the MBAx team :)
Ahmet
