After last week’s events, the floodgates of opportunity opened, and I evaluated my options very closely.
It is with great pride that I announce: On December 3rd I will be a Developer Evangelist with the Asp.Net AJAX product team at Telerik!
I’ve been a (quiet) fan of Telerik tools for the past two years. It’s hard to miss the advertisements on the trade magazines, podcasts, and websites that I consume regularly. After reviewing a handful of Telerik tools, they grew on me. I’ve used JustCode for the last few months and find it to be a valuable asset in my daily coding tasks. I’ve been using the AJAX Controls in a handful of prototypes and really enjoy the flexibility offered to me without having to focus on UI work. It’s a good fit for me, as I believe I can share my infectious enthusiasm for this technology with others and bring great value to Telerik.
I’m going to still be the wise-cracking passionate Asp.Net developer. I’m not going to turn into the Sham-Wow guy for Telerik overnight… but I will be using the Telerik tools in everything that I do.
Those of you who have worked with me know: I am a very loyal and passionate employee who goes out of his way to ensure the success of my employer and my customers. This is not a position I take lightly, and I feel that this attitude matches the role of Evangelist perfectly. As an evangelist, I’ll be the technical conduit between sales, customer service, marketing, and the dev team. I’m going to help take an award winning product and make it even better.
A colleague at my previous employer, after watching me coach a junior developer in a coding technique of some sort commented to me: “Jeff, you’re such a good trainer – you should do this more often.” Little did I know at that time, just how right she was. I presented at the Philly Code Camp last weekend (wrapup post to come), and that teaching buzz grabbed me after my session on SignalR, and it was then that I knew that I was so right for this position.
Over the next few weeks, you’ll see my blog ramp up. I’ll be migrating to a better engine, a better layout, and LOTS more content. You’ll see my twitter activity ramp up, my StackOverflow interactions ramp up, and most of all: you’ll start to find more video content from me.
The best part about this: I will not be limited to my budget, or INETA’s budget in my travels to present at your event. We’ll soon see what my availability looks like, but I’ll be doing a lot more travelling to some places that would NEVER be on my current travel itinerary. I’m already getting my passport renewed so that I can depart from my friendly confines of the Northeastern United States to bring the good word of Asp.Net and Telerik to conferences and User Groups around the world.
My family and I are positively thrilled about this change, and I know that my teammates at Telerik are VERY eager for me to get started. Stay tuned friends, because you’re going to get a lot more great content from yours truly!