The Long Road - Part 2: Learning and Growing
This series of posts will be a mini-history of my career, and the long path that led me to Microsoft. It's about me, so I feel a bit weird posting it, but I think there might be some useful information here for others who are trying to steer their careers in the right direction. (Link to Part 1)
After digging into the networking and security side of things for a while, I found more and more of my time being taken up by development projects, and although I had picked up quite a bit of knowledge about low-level networking and security, I felt that I would make better use of my talents by continuing to be involved on the software side of things as well. One of my former colleagues was getting ready to move to Florida and he was leaving an opening as a lead developer on a small simulation development project. This was mostly a software project, but also had some specialized hardware components, and some networking angles as well. This seemed like a good fit, and would allow me to return to more of a leadership role.
I had a great deal of fun and learned a lot with this role. I was with a company that encouraged personal and career growth, and they paid for me to complete my Master of Business Administration (MBA) while I worked on a team that focused on developing simulation capabilities for a Navy aircraft. Since I was someone who had both software development and networking experience, I got pulled in many different directions and worked on lots of very interesting and challenging projects.
During this time I also got involved with blogging. I used to read technology websites, and there was some mention on some fairly mainstream news site about a blogger at Microsoft who was giving a bit of a peek inside Microsoft. I started reading this blog, and grew out from there, settling in at around 100 feeds with a constantly churning mix of individual bloggers & news sites. Within a few weeks of starting to read blogs, I also started writing a blog called "Blobservations", originally at Bloglines, later at Blogger, and eventually settling at blobservations.com and still later transitioning to onemanshouting.com (now also accessible at rickhallihan.com).
Through participating in blogging, I was able to learn a lot about technology, the industry and also start getting some exposure as someone who thinks about and has opinions related to technology, programming, media, Internet, and any other random thing that I decided to spout off about.
