Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Well, today was my last day in the Macintosh Business Unit. I've worked here ever since I joined over 5 years ago. I feel privileged to have worked with some of the folks who are still here or moved on before me. I had a truly amazing time working on OE, Entourage, IE, MSN, and Virtual PC. It's funny to think back of the days when I first joined. My first visit to Redmond, my first Release To Web, working on a top secret project (Entourage), and most recently learning an entirely new product. I'll always look back on these last 5 years as some of the best times in my life, and I'll very much miss the people.
The good news is that I'm not going far. Monday morning I'll be working one building over on the Hotmail Frontdoor team. I'll be a Lead Program Manager on the Frontdoor infrastructure. My team is responsible for things like DAV, Passport, POP, SMTP and various other Frontdoor protocols as well as a number of other things (many of which I don't know anything about). I'm happy that I'll be doing mail stuff again, but working on a service rather than a fat client. Plus I'll be working with Reeves Little again (Reeves used to be the Test Lead on OE, now a PM in Hotmail).
I decided to pursue this position for a number of reasons, and much of it has to do with where I want my career to go in my next 5 years at MS. I also find that I want new and different challenges. I've been working on Mac related software for a long time and am looking forward to something that's on a totally different scale . Hotmail is something that I feel is a great match because of my backround in mail stuff and my interest in the stuff they are doing. I think the free mail space is getting even more competitive, and I love competition!
So, my office is all packed up (it all fix in 8 boxes!). Not that much stuff. I'm off to my 10 year high school reunion this weekend, and come Monday I'll be sitting in my new office.