Celebrating my 30th birthday & my 1st year in Microsoft

Today is my birthday and what a wonderful day to celebrate my life, but not only. Today I celebrate my first year in Microsoft, one of the most wonderful years in my career.. a year plenty of great new people, amazing challenges, wellness and happiness. 🎉🎊

When I started working for Microsoft last year, I was the Java developer joining the .Net Gurus town. It was a very exceptional situation for my Java friends, because since I started working in 2012, I was always dealing with the open source world, and Microsoft at that time wasn’t in the same planet as us. I even added a disclaimer to tell my contacts in Linkedin that I will not be leaving Java while joining Microsoft 😂 I will be back to this point later.

I thought that being a Java Engineer in Microsoft will be a strange situation. But I found very fast that this was only in my mind: Laurent Ellerbach who is my direct manager is one biggest contributors to the open source .NET Core IoT Libraries and one of my hierarchical managers was a Java Architect in Sun Microsystems 🤓 I even many teams dedicated to developing Java solutions on Azure, helping Java customers to land on Azure and even contributing to the JDK 🤩🥳

Having a direct manager who is coding & open source contributor is a wonderful chance and a very big plus in my job. You can share whatever technical issue with him, and he will not be looking only to Excel 😝 he is fully operational as any Software Engineer. I even got the chance to work on the same project as my manager 🙌

What is the CSE Team ?

First of all let me present you my home, the Commercial Software Engineering team:

The Commercial Software Engineering team (CSE) is a global engineering organization that works directly with the largest companies and not-for-profits in the world to tackle their most significant technical challenges. We’ve helped customers do everything from using AI and deep learning to create sustainable farming practices, protecting rhinos in South Africa with facial recognition, to using blockchain to accelerate and secure payments in the travel industry; all in partnership with their developer teams. 🤩

Every day, our global team helps other developers create and utilize technology to achieve more. We will work on just about anything: blockchain, mobile apps, cloud services, big data ingestion problems, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – you name it. Our wide range of backgrounds and experiences, which like our customers, makes us unique in how we approach customer problems. The Microsoft CSE team works closely with clients to find creative solutions while also upskilling their developers to carry the project forward to a production-ready solution. 💪🏆🎖️

Our team, CSE, is working on many Azure related technologies: Dotnet, Python, Golang and for sure Java and many many other exciting topics and technologies. Our team works on a pretty broad range of projects, from intelligent robots to the trendy chatbots. We are working side-by-side with our customers to deal with the constant change. This is why we need to know many technologies and solutions 👈 and this is the most wonderful advantage of our job. We permanently keep doing new and interesting stuff 🤩 we never fall in monotony. Even more, we have dedicated time and ressources for learning new stuff even thru the internal MSFT materials or thru many external libraries and e-learning subscriptions that MSFT offers for us 😍 There is more  and better, we have great workshop events called “Openhack” organized by CSE and the Product Teams. An Openhack is a 3-days workshop dedicated for developers interested in improving their technical skills within a specific leading-edge field (Serverless, AI/ML, DevOps, Containers, Big Data, etc..). This event is open to everyone and not only for MSFTees 🤗 You can learn more about Openhacks here.

How CSE changed my life ?

As  I mentioned before, in CSE we do lot of things, we play with many technologies, we work massively on sharing knowledge, practices and feedbacks between teams. This multitude started calling me to try to do new things. I started my journey in MSFT by taking the Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 training and certification. As I never got the chance to dig into it so deeper, I found the great opportunity to play with Java on it, and the experience was amazing.

I got the chance to work on many amazing projects, and attended many presentations about projects written in other than Java, and the great level of engineering and the crazy topics kept appealing me.. but I had the feeling of resisting to “leaving Java”.. it was that strange feeling, do I came here to lose Java? Will I be unfaithful while leaving my lovely language? I was always scared even of making a “Hello World” in C# 😂

By the end of the year, I got the chance to join an interesting project covering Golang & Terraform. I never did them before, so I started the upskilling on these technologies. I hadn’t that fear to do Golang, as it’s not .Net, so it’s Ok..

In one of the discussions with my manager, he told me about the new features of the .Net Framework, and how he is using it in SBCs.. and he asked me a question: why don’t you give it a try? 🤔

Here I started thinking seriously to break the rule and to try the .Net 🤭 Yes I did it ! 😁 I installed the .Net Core 3.1 on my Mac and tried some “Hello World”. It was a very similar to every programming language.. nothing bad and nothing strange.. and more.. I wasn’t hurt and everything was ok.. 😁 Even more, when I discussed that with my manager, he gave me the chance to join an active project where I got the chance to practice .Net programming in a real world project. My team mates helped me a lot to do the job. I was extremely happy because I could help my team to satisfy our customer request. I was extremely happy to attend the Demo sessions and to see my .Net code running and being built into the Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines.

My manager helped me to defeat my .Net fear and to enjoy the real pleasure of having wide range of technologies and to be able to easily make the customer happy. 😄 even more, my colleagues were happy to help me on that and they are keeping encourage me to discover and achieve more.

Before joining MSFT, I consider myself as a Java Developer,  hardly tagged with my favorite technology. Although I was also working on Angular, React, NodeJS, Docker, Kubernetes and many other technologies. After my first year spent here in Microsoft, I’m the new Nebrass Lamouchi, Software Engineer who ❤️ Java but who can be working on any cool and exciting technology. 😍

This is can be small while talking about it, but this is a very big achievement I unlocked in my first year in MSFT. I’m happy that other than the technical skills, my manager helped me to improve my engineering maturity.

It’s not a matter of a language, all is related of solving a problem in a specific context. I was and I will always be the Java crazy lover, and I will also work hard to achieve a success and resolve the problem. I will always work hard to be a “Software Engineer”. After one year spent here, I’m now coding in Python, .Net Core, Golang and even C++ 😍 I did some Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Terraform, and certainly so much Azure..

Finally, I wish to share with you my birthday cake; a homemade Java based cake, made by my wife:

This is was my first step, in the long MSFT career path. I wish to have the chance to write a blog post about my 5th, 10th or even my 25th year in MSFT, a company where we take care of people.