Where has Jim been?

I have clearly been away for a while.  This blog effectively shut down about 18 months ago.  For the last few months I've been trying to figure out if I should reopen it, and I set a date of Jan 1 to make that decision.  I've decided to attempt to return to writing entries in this blog.

So what happened?

At work, the simple answer is that I got extremely busy.  There was a 12-15 month period where I had a series of projects with very short term deadlines.  Almost none of them involved my normal day job (which also pretty much stopped for that same period).

At one level it was a pretty interesting period -- I got involved with teams and people that I normally wouldn't have, and was exposed to technologies and groups that I'd previously been fairly ignorant of.  I always enjoy the opportunities to be exposed to an learn new things.  However, it did come with the cost that it was extremely time consuming and very exhausting.  And I'm glad that it mostly seems to be over for now.

About 10 months ago the biggest time sinks came to an end, and I returned to thinking about the transactions directions and what we could be doing next.  Because so much time had passed, we were now in a rush to get our planning in shape for the next round of releases.  I spent the next few months getting a set of a feature ideas birthed for that next round.  That was as intense a period as any that previous year.  The team is now off making them real, and I believe that they'll prove to be exciting when they ship.

Then, having gotten the work moving, I took stock of where I was.  I realized that I needed a change -- that while I loved the technology and the team, the excitement was ebbing.  I needed to push my envelope again and try something that would stretch me.

So, about six months ago I changed teams and took a position with the team that does messaging infrastructure -- from the WCF channels through to our enterprise messaging work (which includes MSMQ).  It is a very different role for me in many ways: it is more breadth based, while I've been mostly a depth-first architect.  It involves technologies that I've been aware of, but don't have the same level of involvement that I've had with transactions.  And it is with different people, although, again, it is with folks that have been nearby in the past.

I can't say that life has gotten slower.  I'm still on a learning curve.  I do, however, think that I understand the slope more than I did when I started.  I think I'll be able to find time for this blog now.  We'll have to see.

What does this mean for this blog?

I intend to continue writing here about transactions.  It is still a long standing passion of mine.  However, you should expect to see a somewhat broader mix of postings.  Some may even be about messaging…

I'll try to make sure that I mix in articles with code (since those seem to get the highest readership ;)), but I've never posted purely coding articles, and won't start now.

Oh, and, time willing, I will return to the resource manager project series.