I am joining Cloud AI team to work on Azure Search
It has been over 3 years since I joined the Azure Portal team. During that time I learned a lot about every aspect of web and mobile development. I delivered over 20 technical talks at different conferences around the World and local meetups. It was amazing to take the new Portal from preview to v1. In the meantime, during the //oneweek hackathon, together with a few other folks, we built a prototype of the Azure Mobile App. After getting feedback from Scott Guthrie who said that "it would be super useful" I started working on the app overnight.
I didn't know much about mobile development at the time, but I wanted to learn. I didn't know much about complexities of Active Directory authentication and Azure Resource Manager APIs. I just knew that it would be super cool to have an app that would allow me to check the status of my Azure resources while waiting for my lunch. Receiving a push notification, and being able to scale VM from my phone would be also tremendously valuable.
When I started working on the app full time, my dream came true. I could truly connect my passion with work. I enjoyed the long hours, and late nights we all put to make it happen. The day when Scott Hanselman presented the Azure App at the //build conference was on of the best days of my life.
Now, when the Azure App is released, and backed by great team, I can move to the next challenge.
Machine learning is becoming part of every aspect of our lives. Over last few years, ML crossed a threshold necessary to be extremely useful. I always wanted to be part of it. I took a great Coursera class by Andrew Ng, I started overnight project StockEstimator and I got involved in SeeingAI to learn how Real-World Machine Learning looks like.
Now, I'm taking it to the next level. I am joining Azure Search Team to lead their User Experience. I will be responsible for bringing the product to customers. While using my existing web development knowledge, I will have an amazing opportunity to learn more about Big Data, AI and ML.
Azure Search is managed cloud search service that offers scalable full-text search over multiple languages, geo-spatial search, filtering and faceted navigation, type-ahead queries, hit highlighting, and custom analyzers. You can find more details in this talk by Pablo Castro (Azure Search manager and creator of Open Data Protocol).
The cool thing about working for Microsoft is that you may end up working with person who created HTTP protocol. Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, former Tim Berners-Lee's student, who shared office with Håkon Wium Lie (creator of CSS), joined my new team this month. What's even cooler, he is sitting next to me :)
In my new office with Henrik:
If you want to learn more about all the cool stuff we are doing at Cloud AI group there is an awesome .NET Rocks Podcast with Joseph Sirosh. Check it out!
There is also awesome talk by Joseph from the last Connect(); conference, which includes JFK files demo presented by Corom Thompson from my team (creator of How-Old.NET). In that demo Corom showcases how you can use Azure Search and Cognitive Services to explore JFK files. Super cool! You can see demo in below video, and code on github.
It has never been a better time to work on the intersection of Cloud and Artificial Intelligence!