Last month, I have decided to seek opportunities outside Microsoft after 4 years and left my job at the Azure Linux team. It was my first job after college.

It has been a great journey in which I had a chance to fulfill the dream I had on the day I joined: doing relevant open source work at Microsoft. Even though the first half of it was trying to get there, the rest has been an amazing ride, for which I am very thankful for.

People so far seem to be interested in where I am going next, rather than why I have left. Briefly, I wanted to work on the upstream technology rather than integrating it to Azure and my responsibilities were increasingly diverging from what I really wanted to be doing. At the Software Development Engineer role, the extracurricular but relevant evangelism and open source contribution efforts I love doing became increasingly difficult to justify or get recognized for.

I am far too excited to tell what’s next for me! Stay tuned.