Friday June 7th will be my last day at Microsoft.

I've been at Microsoft longer than I've been a husband, longer than I've been a father, longer than I've lived in the Pacific Northwest. It's been an awesome twenty year plus ride, but the time has come for me to take on new challenges.

I'm joining NEO Global Development's brand new Seattle office (which is really in Redmond). NEO is a community driven open source project delivering the technical underpinnings for the Smart Economy. NEO Global Development (aka NGD) is the technical R&D arm of the NEO Foundation, the NEO project's governing body. I'm going to be the Chief Architect for the Seattle office.

This move will reunite me with former colleague and long-time friend John deVadoss. I worked for John for back in my Architecture Strategy Team days. John is the director of NGD's Seattle office and I'm thrilled to be working with him again.

I had the privilege of presenting at NEO DevCon back in February. It was inspiring to meet folks from NEO's global community. NGD's main office is in Shanghai, NSPCC is in St. Petersberg, NeoResearch is in Brasil and the City of Zion community has team members from all corners of the Earth. I can't lie - the opportunity to work with this far reaching and diverse global community was a big selling point for me joining NGD Seattle.

NGD Seattle's primary focus is on developer tools and experience ('natch) for the NEO platform. John and my-soon-to-be-colleague Longfei Wang previewed a few things we're working on last month at Consensus 2019. In particular John showed off NEO Express Node, a private NEO blockchain management tool that I built. Of course, the Consensus preview is just a small taste of what we plan to deliver - especially once I join NGD full time and we build out more of our Seattle based engineering team.

While developer experience will be my primary focus, I also expect to pitch in on the core NEO platform. NEO 3.0 development is already in full swing. Core platform might not be my focus, but platform capabilities and developer experience go hand in hand. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunity to contibute to the core as we work towards our 3.0 release.

I'll miss Microsoft - especially the amazing people I've had the opportunity to work with over the years. It's particularly hard to leave the xlang project. Cross platform language projection has been a passion project of mine for several years now. Knowing xlang is in the capable hands of folks like Ben, Scott, Ryan and Kenny does make it easier. Besides, xlang is open source so I can still submit PRs if I get really Microsoft-homesick, right?