Looks like the cat’s out of the bag

Yes, the rumours are true.

As my soon-to-be-new boss, Roger Lawrence, has just announced tonight, I’ve accepted an offer to come on board the Australian DPE team at Microsoft as the Academic Developer Evangelist. I see this as a culmination of the past 7 or 8 years of my career and various activities, each one in turn seeming to push me further and further in the direction of dedicating myself to the task of enthusing students and the groups of people who look after them about technology.

I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of students, teachers and faculty members and talking about computing technology and can’t quite believe it’s only about 10 days before I officially start with the team. I’d like to take a moment to call out the guys I’ve worked with at Readify for being the best bunch of dev’s, guru’s, techheads, geeks that I’ve had the pleasure of being alongside of. Don’t worry guys – you haven’t heard the last from me by a long shot.

Oh, and for all my fellow student teachers at UNE – yes, I’ll still be studying with you. 🙂

My role as Academic Developer Evangelist covers all of the Microsoft technologies, from the languages such as C# and VB and the tools to use them such as Visual Studio (including the free Express range – how cool is that? Free powerful developer tools – and that’s only the start!), databases such as the soon to be released SQL Server 2008, design tools like Expression Design, and the really cool stuff like Popfly, XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft Robotics Studio, Photosynth and the whole Live space including Live Mesh (have you checked that out yet? You can keep your data online and accessible from wherever you are. And that’s just software – then there are all the programs and events like Imagine Cup, Student Day and so on… awesome.

I don’t think I’ve thought or said the word "cool" as much as I have in the last 12 months or so with so many of these technologies coming out. And I get to travel the country to talk to universities, schools and students themselves about all of this and more – showing them that technology isn’t simply a commodity to use, but something that can really change the way you approach today’s world.

COOL!

There’s a huge amount of work for me to do, and I can’t wait to get started!