I Was Hired by Microsoft as a Director of Community

On August 10th, I started a new role with Microsoft as a Director of Community, ending a six month job hunt that eventually I’ll write about. The LinkedIn announcement got a lot of attention (140K impressions as of today) which was fun to see! 🙌

One point of confusion is that I was hired as a Director of Community, not the Director of Community; there’s an assumption that somehow I am overseeing everything that Microsoft does with communities which is not the case. I’ve had people ask me if I can help fix/improve/change a variety of Microsoft community programs, and I’ve had to tell them all that I’m not involved with any of those communities. 🤷 Director at Microsoft is a title not that different from Amazon’s Principal manager, and I’m currently an individual contributor. I hope to be at Microsoft for many years to come!

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Taskin’s Very Problematic Kickstarter Campaign

I posted a version of this on Reddit.

Taskin, a San Francisco-based company that primarily sells bags and luggage, has done a crowdfunding bait-and-switch on their recent Kickstarter campaign and a gone silent on responding to backers (and possibly gone under as a company, not sure).

Don’t buy from them, you might not get what you paid for.

Crowdfunding campaigns not delivering what they promise is certainly not new, but what is surprising about this is that Taskin has been doing crowdfunding for seven years. They’ve done 16 campaigns in total, raising $1.36M in funds over the years. They were a reputable company that made great products; I backed several of them, and purchased others. I really liked their stuff!

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Big Wall Projects: Three Down, Zero to Go

We have some big walls in our home, and while many of them have personal photos of my kids and family, I also love creating large displays using my photos and/or colorful metal posters from Displate. I wanted to share a little about the three projects that I’ve worked on with my wife over the past year in the hopes that it may inspire others — especially people who love taking photos — to show off their photos in new ways. Let’s jump into it…

The Travel Photo Map

My wife and I love international traveling (our kids, not so much 😜), and we’ve been afforded the opportunities to do so more than most. My work for HTC and AWS has also given me an opportunity to see places around the world I likely would not otherwise have gone to. I wanted a way to easily visualize which countries I had gone to and which ones I had not.

When I came across this Wooden World Travel Photo Map by Enjoy The Wood Kickstarter campaign back in early 2024, I immediately showed it to my wife, and we agreed this would be a wonderful addition to one of our big living room walls. The fact that it was a Ukrainian company that we could support financially was a cherry on top. The thought of installing it was a bit intimidating, so it took us a little over a year before it finally got put up, but once we got started it went much faster than the we thought.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

In the end, it was worth it, and it’s a wonderful thing to look at, remember some fun memories, and, of course, it’s a great discussion piece with visitors to our home. Enjoy The Wood has a variety of other wooden map products.

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Podcast Guest Yet Again: MobileViews Episode 621

I’ve known Todd Ogasawara for over 20 years, and we’ve both been in the tech industry a long time (he’s since retired). We had a great conversation about a variety of topics, and this episode went much longer than normal because we had so much fun chatting (hence the 480p YouTube quality).

Here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and there are some other ways to listen linked from Podbeam.


An AI-created summary for some of what we discussed (full description here):

For MobileViews 621 I’m joined by longtime friend Jason Dunn filling in as guest co-host. We kicked off by discussing the “moatless” nature of modern AI tools, where hopping between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT is easier than ever, though our deep ecosystem preferences often dictate our ultimate choices. This led into a deep dive on note-taking app migrations. Jason shared his recent departure from Evernote after a shocking 171% price hike under its new holding company, Bending Spoons. Using an AI-assisted plugin, he successfully migrated 16 years of data to a local Obsidian vault. I shared my own frustrations with Microsoft OneNote, where basic tasks like syncing handwriting on my Boox e-ink tablet are quietly draining my limited monthly Copilot AI credits, pushing me to explore Obsidian as well.

Backyard Bird Photos

I haven’t taken many photos of birds in my lifetime because most of the time, they are difficult to photograph subjects; I don’t have (or want) the massive 600mm lens real bird photographers use. Nor am I the photographer who will hide in the bushes for hours to get the perfect shot. I’m a lazy photographer. 😜

It just so happened that for the first time in 15 years of living where I do, a number of birds decided to use our house to build nests. Of the three that were started, only one resulted in baby birds — but it gave me an opportunity to get photos unlike any I’d been able to capture before. Enjoy!

Click each image to see a larger version.

For my fellow photography nerds: these were taken with my Nikon Z6 III and my very slow 28-400mm lens (I didn’t want to get too close) — thank goodness for Lightroom’s excellent noise reduction!

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Chatting Community with AWS User Group Ecuador

Last weekend I had a chance to connect with Gabriel Torres for an AWS User Group Ecuador live event! We discussed a variety of topics including all the usual “why community” ones, along with a few hot-button AI topics.


🌎 If you’re in/around Ecuador in early September, be sure to attend their AWS Community Day. As I explain in the video, connecting with other people and building your learning network is one of the most important things you can do for your career and well-being.

This will very likely be the last AWS-related event I do as I start a new job pretty soon, and it’s not with Amazon… 😉

I Was a Guest on the Day Two DevOps Podcast

Last month I had a wonderful opportunity to be on the Day Two DevOps podcast and talk with 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance about community management, how community works in the AI era — including the impossible challenge of detecting AI-created content — and some delightful topic side quests, including the first public sharing of my vibe-coded solution for movie collecting that has been tremendously effective at draining my wallet. 😅

💖 I had a lot of fun connecting with these two great people and I encourage you to give it a listen/watch.

Updating my Mini Charging Pack Yet Again: this is the v3

Apparently I like updating this kit, because only a couple of months later, I’m doing it yet again! I was recently in a hotel with USB-C ports, and it made me realize I was missing an opportunity for easy charging by not having a couple of extra cables. And UGREEN, a favourite charging brand of mine, came out with a perfect new product.

Mini Charging Pack v3 | 18.5oz / 526g

The final (?) form of the charging kit…maybe it will last for the rest of 2026?

The v3 only has two changes from the v2, denoted with stars ⭐️:

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Svelt Laptop Stand Review: Too Solid For Its Own Good

Last year, I came across a product that looked appealing, and so I pre-ordered it: the Svelt laptop stand. It wasn’t a Kickstarter, which I have been known to back a lot of (just ask my wife 😂), just a “please trust us with your money and pre-order it”.

When it arrived, the box was so heavy I thought they accidentally sent me more than one. This is a very well engineered product that is extremely sturdy, and made of high-quality materials, but I think that is part of the problem: the materials chosen optimize for firmness and not low carry weight.

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I Was a Guest on Gainsight’s UNCHURNED Podcast

🎤 Back in May I was a guest on the Gainsight podcast, “Unchurned”, with host Josh Schachter and the episode went live recently.

We had an excellent conversation about building communities, the importance of the tone early members set, and how metrics that matter to community program managers — such as community active rate — might have no relevance to senior leaders. Community managers need to be prepared to answer the “So what?” question and point to metrics that impact team goals.


You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if that’s your thing! Here’s a summary from the Gainsight blog post:

Two hands. A free Slack channel. A spreadsheet. That was the entire toolkit when AWS asked Jason Dunn to build a developer community.

Jason Dunn spent five years on building something people actually want to belong to. He grew a developer community into thousands of members spread across more than a hundred countries, working with far less budget and tooling than you’d expect.

This conversation digs into what separates a living community from a glorified contact list. Why your earliest members carry so much weight. When to keep the door open and when to guard it. How to prove value when your best wins resist a dashboard. Why technical people walk the second something smells like a pitch. And how one small, slightly absurd reward became a badge people chased for months. A Real talk on getting people to show up for each other.