Taking the red pill... - Our New Microsoft Developer Evangelist!
That is terrific news! Congratulations! I know there's a whole lot of folks that are glad this role has finally been filled! Definitely let me know the next time your in Tulsa.
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Taking the red pill...
Well everyone, I finally did it! I've been offered (and I accepted) a job as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. The family and I are *very* excited about this, and I hope you are too. There's a lot of stuff to do now, especially around move planning, and interim travel arrangements to get back and forth to the new location, but I expect that everything will fall into place. This position really feels right, and I'm confident that everything will work out well. This time around, I have more time to plan our move, and actually participate in the move effort rather than just drive a car. That's going to be one of the best things about working for Microsoft - with the control they give me over my own schedule allows me to meet (and hopefully beat) everyone's expectations!
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.