Saying Goodbye...

Today was kind of a sad day at work, as the deployment team said goodbye to an active member (well, formerly active member, I guess), as well as a deployment alum.

Mike "Sampy" Sampson is leaving the Developer Division to work with Channel 9, where he was already a frequent contributor and moderator.  Sampy had been with the deployment team for 3 years (during which time we only managed to ship one product, but we aren't holding him personally responsible for that).  We spent his last 3 weeks doing some pair programming, trying to knock out some very useful features before he left: he worked the keyboard, and I worked the mouse.  The team will miss his off-beat sense of humor and passion for agile methods, as well as his flaming horse.  We all wish him the best of luck.

Today was also the last day at Microsoft for Tarik Nesh-Nash, who spent nearly 2 years with the deployment team as a tester before moving on to try his hand in the dev world (with Web.NET), as well as dabbling with some PMing within Dev Div's internal tools group.  Tarik is joining the International Committee of the Red Cross.  His responsibilities coordinating relief efforts, negotiating with local authorities and promoting international humanitarian law.  I forget which of us first referred to leaving the deployment team as a "promotion" (purely in jest). Comedic genius of this sort must be used to serve a higher purpose, which he will have ample opportunity to do with the ICRC. Tarik will spend a month training in Geneva before moving on to his first assignment in Northern Iraq. Congratulations and the best of luck to Tarik.