Starting my Second Innings at Microsoft
I will be starting my second innings at Microsoft on 11th October, 2021. After years of building customer facing products at my self-owned business, I believe it is now time to accept new challenges and build new things.
I am excited to be joining Microsoft again. I will be shifting back my full time focus to building products at Microsoft and be a part of its mission “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
A Little Background
If you have been following my journey so far, you may already know that after doing my B. Tech., I started my career (after getting selected through Code4Bill competition and doing an internship) as Software Development Engineer at Microsoft in 2007. At Microsoft, I had the most ideal job, worked and connected with amazing people and shipped great products.
As Microsoft allowed employees to develop Windows Phone apps, I was able to gather good initial success (a million download, later 3 million+) when building customer facing apps. Due to the demand of meeting customer requirements, I decided to step into a full time entrepreneur role. When I left Microsoft in 2013, I wrote more about my exciting first innings at Microsoft in this previous blog post.
My Entrepreneurial Journey as an Engineer
When I forayed into the full-time entrepreneurship role and pulled in my wife too, I didn’t have a long term plan. I only knew and was passionate about one thing: build products that users will love. That is what I did over the last few years. I built multiple end to end products and apps on a wide variety of platforms (web and mobile). I believe I acted more like a product minded Software Engineer rather than an entrepreneur.
Here are some of the featured products I built over the years →
- 🌐 https://templateflip.com/ – E-Store for Templates, Themes and Graphic Items.
- 🛠 https://mdigi.tools/ – Web based digital tools.
- 📰 https://dailydevbytes.com/ – News portal for Developers and Makers.
- 📈 TradeDroid (private) – FinTech Application (Trading Algo strategies builder, Back-testing and Live Algo Trading).
- 📱 https://kunruchcreations.com/apps – Windows and Android apps.
- 1 million downloads on Windows Phone..
- 2 million downloads on Windows Phone..
- Effects of being featured in Red Stripe deals on Windows Phone
- Ultimately saw 4 million total downloads for apps on Windows Phone and Android.
- ✏https://superdevresources.com/ – Content portal (WordPress) for Startups and Businesses. 100,000+ Monthly active Users
I also worked with a few startups doing remote work and collaboration.
I also did some Open Source Projects for learning and contributing back to the community:
- MMCSS – A CSS framework – built with SCSS (GitHub)
- MMPilot – A minimal modern static website generator powered by Node.js (GitHub)
- SDR Tools – Open Source Web based tools
- SDR News – News aggregator built with Vue.js
- Open Source Themes and Templates – WordPress and HTML
P.S. Shout out to my wife who dived into this with me. She is primarily doing graphic design and writing. Do check out her work.
Learnings
Life is about continuous learning, experiencing new things, and growing. I am thankful to have the opportunity to personally experience the entrepreneurship role. This allowed me to expand my perspective and knowledge. I got to understand and experience all verticals of making a successful product: conceptualization, design, development, continuous deployment, customer feedback, optimization & speed, sustainability, and even sales & marketing.
I also got the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity of exploring and diving into many new technologies and frameworks, UI design and ever increasing set of cloud services.
I was able to experience and understand the decision making process of building a product based on customer interests. I also got the opportunity to mentor developers and got to learn from them too. I am also thankful for getting the opportunity to network with bright, motivated and energetic people in the startup space.
I would also add that I got better understanding of managing finances and acquired an interest in investing (thanks to the TradeDroid project which required me to learn about the markets). Learning about investing helped me in opening my eyes to see the bigger picture and understanding the importance of long term thinking. I hope to continue learning about investing as the learning never stops.
Transitioning back into Full Time Engineering Role
I love building products and love to learn new things. I also love networking with people and working with bright minds. Working at Microsoft fulfils all of this for me. Microsoft India has great set of people. I am glad to be given the opportunity to work again at Microsoft. I look forward to my second innings at Microsoft as Senior Software Engineer.