Isaac Asimov was once quoted as saying “The only constant is change”. That has certainly been true of my time with the DotNetNuke project. Over the last seven years of working on the DotNetNuke project and working at DotNetNuke Corporation I have held a number of different roles within the organization. I have defined and coded major product features, built and managed the DotNetNuke Marketplace, managed the release process, managed both OpenForce Conferences, oversaw the QA function, and created and managed the DotNetNuke Professional support team. During this time there have been a lot of things for which I am proud to have hand in developing and a few that I wish I could go back and do differently. Through it all, I have been extremely proud to be a part of this organization, both as a volunteer and later as a co-founder and employee at DotNetNuke Corporation.
Once again, my role within DotNetNuke is changing as I hand over my responsibilities on the Engineering team to Rob Chartier and his team. I am moving away from having day to day involvement in the code or managing the associated engineering teams. The upcoming 5.4.3 release will likely be my last release as an official member of the engineering group. While I am capable of functioning in the engineering role, my skills and passion are more closely aligned with those of the Product and Community Teams. Change is always hard, but I am happy that we’ve been able to grow DotNeNuke Corporation to the point where we have a great team of engineers and support personnel, allowing me to pursue different opportunities within the company.
I am currently in the middle of transitioning to a role on the Product team working closely with Shaun Walker and Israel Martinez in helping to analyze the competitive landscape, and taking input from various stakeholders to define a product roadmap and specific product requirements which will guide the engineering team moving forward. I will also have the opportunity to do some feature prototyping and proof of concepts so that I can stay somewhat involved in coding which I still love. Finally, I will also be working closely with Scott Wilhite and Chris Paterra on various community building initiatives, which I will be discussing further later today.
DotNetNuke has always been a community driven product built around the vision and leadership of Shaun. Even with the formation of DotNetNuke Corporation that has not changed. This is a great opportunity for me to get back to working more closely with Shaun and Scott and I look forward to this change in my day to day responsibilities. When Shaun, Scott, Nik and I started this company almost four years ago, we didn’t know how things would ultimately end up, but we knew that like a rollercoaster, there would be ups and downs and sudden course changes. That has certainly held true and I am excited to see what the future of DotNetNuke holds for me around the next curve.