Building a Connected World

Several years ago, I was given the Microsoft Achievement Award.  The award gives you up to 3 months to take a sabbatical.  I decided to take mine from July 3rd to September 28th which gave me 2 months with the whole family on vacation and then a month of time with the kids at school.

It was an amazing experience.  So what did I do?  A lot.

• Spent some priceless quality time with my wife and kids.
• Built a home gym and lost just shy of 40 pounds.
• Bought a kayak, learned to kayak and kayaked a number of lakes in eastern Washington.
• Bought a bike rack and started biking with the family.
• Hiked a number of places in the Cascades.
• Studied mindfulness and incorporated meditation into my daily routine.
• Built a lot of lego kits with my kids.
• Re-discovered the library.
• Read a lot of books.
• Cataloged the 362 movies in my blu ray collection.
• Watched a lot of movies.
• From Mr. Robot to 5 years of The Wire, caught up on TV shows I’d wanted to watch.
• Studied the art of writing a screenplay and wrote a thriller.
• Played a lot of video games on Xbox One and PS4.
• Went to PAX, took in a session on writing video games, and played some upcoming games.
• Learned how to code up a game in Unity and created a game.
• Studied VR and AR and picked up a Gear VR to complement my Oculus Rift DK2.
• I made my game compatible with Oculus Rift.
• Helped test Microsoft HoloLens.
• Studied bitcoin and blockchain technology.
• Mined bitcoin.
• Ate my fair share of smores with family and friends around the new firepit at the cabin.
• Took some online courses.
• Read more on data science and created a Techmeme-like news aggregation engine in Python.
• Went to TechReady for a day and presented a session on Azure Resource Manager.
• Read up on the cultures of Amazon, Google and Twitter.
• Studied venture deals and venture financing.
• From wine to movies to crates of loot, tried a number of subscription based services / examined subscription business models.
• Advised a startup.
• Spent a week in Boston for my brother’s wedding and visiting family.
• Took an all-day smoking and grilling glass at the Seattle BBQ and Grilling School.
• Made a number of different types of bread from scratch.
• Started tweeting more and gained >80,000 followers.
• Put in a putting green at the cabin.
• Camped at Camano Island with friends.
• Explored miles of trails behind our cabin with a friend on his 4x4 side by side.
• Built a trail mapper app for Windows Phone 10 to track where we’d gone in the 4x4.
• Became an amateur nature landscape photographer.
• Looked at developing speech driven interfaces and wrote code for Amazon Echo.
• Hacked around with the new Audible API.
• Made my home smarter by installing a number of intelligent devices like thermostat and smoke detectors.
• Read more on Bluetooth beacons / iBeacons and wrote some code to work with gimbal and estimote beacons.
• Built a shed.
• Bought a Raspberry Pi 2 b, installed Windows 10 Core, and wrote some IoT code.
• Took Nicholas to his first cub scout meeting and starting planning for our first camp out in October.
• Accepted an offer to tech edit a new book on Microservices in Docker on Azure.
• Started blogging again.

For the last one, starting the blog again, with the sabbatical activities I’ve accumulated enough experiences and potential for blog entries that I feel I can consistently keep a blog going (this had been a bit of a challenge in the past as a lot of my work is considered confidential).

Thanks for reading and expect weekly updates here and more frequent updates on twitter for the foreseeable future.

Best,
Marc