Today is Blue Beanie day. With that in mind, it is as good a time as any to let the cat out the bag. Very soon, I’ll be leaving my current company (Plain Concepts), and joining the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft as a full time employee. I think that might even be a first for a former-Opera Software employee.
Now, I’m not exactly new to IE. For the past couple of years, first as a userAgent, and then more recently as a Microsoft vendor, I’ve worked on some projects with the IE marketing team. From things like answering developer questions, to IE Platform Status, IE Developer Channel, and more. But now I’ll be dropping my vendor prefix–and in the grand tradition of CSS–my alias will be renamed. V-dastor will soon become dstorey at Microsoft.com. (yey, I managed to get my handle I use on Twitter, et al!)
One of the biggest changes is that I will be moving from marketing to Engineering. Not only that, but from Developer Relations (which I’ve done for much of my career, whether it be in engineering, marketing, or wherever else each company decides to place this function) to Program Management. Instead of assisting developers, and promoting and writing about the web standards, I will help build them. I’ll be on the layout team that deals with technology such as CSS, SVG, WebGL, and a whole lot of web compatibility and interoperability. I’m not sure yet exactly what I’ll be working on, except hard engineering challenges. It is an exciting change; one that I’m sure will be incredibly challenging. I’ve worked as the product manager on Opera Dragonfly developer tools, but not as a Program Manager, so I’m nervously excited about what is ahead. But I’m sure I’ll get a lot of support as I get up to speed.
So, now I’ll be a web platform engineer. It’ll be much less of my job description to hang out with you guys, but I’ll not be going away completely. As I’m sure you have noticed, the IE team has opened up a great deal from a couple of years ago. We’re involved more in the community, and our plans are more transparent. It is easier than ever to reach the people working on the product. I’m sure I’ll be sharing some of the things I’m working on when I can, and blogging when I have things to say. There are, of course, many interesting and knowledgeable people to follow. On the web developer ecosystems team (which has taken over a number of DevRel responsibilities), Charles Morris heads up the team, and you can also engage the likes of Antón Molleda, Jonathan Sampson, Jacob Rossi, and my fellow Brit Adrian Bateman. While I haven’t met a bunch of my new team yet, you may have seen Greg Whitworth answering your CSS questions, and Frank Olivier owns interop, and WebGL amongst others. I’d recommend you follow them all. I also want to send a big thanks to Rey Bango for helping me get set up with the IE team after I left Motorola, following the cancellation of a (secret) project. He is always full of great IE knowledge, and bad dancing (NSFW, maybe). And, of course, Chewy Chong and Millo who have been my bosses on the IE DevRel side while I was a vendor.
Many of you may wonder why Internet Explorer, especially after being at Opera. Well, today’s IE is not the IE of 2005. There are a lot of outdated preconceptions about IE, that will be a challenge to shift (but hey, if I didn’t like a challenge, I won’t have worked DevRel for Opera, going up against the big guns). But things are opening up, and the product is improving. IE in the Windows 10 technical preview now has the most implemented ECMAScript 6 features. It is the fastest in benchmarks such as Sunspider, once used as a stick to beat it with. The Chakra team are doing a fantastic job. IE now has WebGL, that many people thought would never be added. IE has led the way on modern touch with Pointer Events, that has broad developer support, such as from the jQuery and Dojo teams. Features such as ObjectRTC with Opus are in active development. I believe that we can go toe to toe with Chrome when it comes to implementing standards and moving the web forward, and I want to become part of making that a reality. A strong IE challenging Firefox and Chrome is good for the web.
If you want to go on this ride with me, follow me at @dstorey on Twitter, or if you have any web standards related questions you can mail me at my twitter handle @microsoft.com once that becomes active.