MSDN Magazine Gets New Editor (Introducing Diego Dagum)

Hello, everybody.

Mi name is Diego Dagum and I recently became the new editor director for MSDN Magazine.

After two years of leadership, former editor Howard Dierking decided to accept a new challenge, so we were working together these last weeks in the skill transfer.

I’ll share some facts about me, my background as a developer and as an editor. In later posts, I’ll let you know about my editorial line for your magazine.

About me

• Born in Argentina, I got my bachelor degree in Computer Sciences in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).
• I started as a developer for professional, enterprise projects in the early 90’s, almost twenty years ago. I can tell you, dear reader, that I have coded in a large variety of programming languages. Since relics like FORTRAN or Clipper (and other xBase dialects), living-deads like COBOL (I had been told in the University those years that was not being used anymore in the industry… allo? ), complex but politically correct like C-Language and, closer to these days, C# and Java.
• In fact, before joining Microsoft, I was a Java developer with a very active participation in the Java community. I’m proud of having presented a paper in the 1st Conference “Principles and Practices of Programming Java” , in Dublin, Ireland, in 2002.
• You may imagine, dear reader, that having been involved in enterprise, often mission-critical development projects made me, as the time went by, not just a senior developer but an application architect. I promise you, dear reader, that in the new course of MSDN Magazine you’ll learn not just about the latest development techniques on the MS and particularly .NET platforms but I’ll help you plan your career in order to think as an architect in your next projects. The application architect role is the natural evolution in the developer career path, after senior developer or developer lead.
• I’m a MS employee since the end of 2004 and I started as a technical evangelist, fostering .NET adoption for world-class, mission-critical projects. While .NET had been out there for two years by then, in the enterprise sector didn’t have yet massive adoption and IT managers were, therefore, not yet decided to use it for line of business applications. This has a lot to do with my story as an editor, so I’ll start covering it in the next bullets.
• I started compiling every month the 10 most important news, relevant for application architects no matter the platform they were working for, and sending that as a newsletter. As a value-added, I started blogging every week explaining certain architecture trends in my own words and exclusively for my own audience (a few corporate accounts in Latin America).
• When the news was told in Microsoft headquarters, I soon became content strategist for the Architecture Center in MSDN. The experience was something new for me, as my main background still was in application development, not content creation.
• However I was learning all the tricks of the trade by not just managing the content plan for that website but also as content owner for the Architecture track at North America TechEd conference.
• Working with authors, technical writers, and other content-related professionals for some few years opened for me the doors to the editor role in The Architecture Journal, a Microsoft magazine on architecture trends, based on community contributions. The Journal comes every quarter and despite I took now this responsibility, there are –for the moment- no plans to remove the Journal duty from me. In other words, I’ll lead both magazines.

This is, in brief, my story as a developer and as an editor. In subsequent posts, dear reader, I’ll reveal details on my editorial plans. I hope you get easily excited when you learn about these!

Sincerely,

Diego Dagum
Editor Director
MSDN Magazine