With all the announcements of people changing jobs, I was starting to feel kind of left out! Look at all these community people that have made major career changes in 2021 – either within their existing company, to a different org altogether, or on to blissful retirement:

• Andy Mallon
• Melissa Connors
• Kendra Little
• Jess Pomfret
• Nick Harshbarger
• Argenis Fernandez
• Andy Yun
• Sander Stad
• Jeremiah Peschka
• Cathrine Wilhelmsen
• Taryn Pratt
• Alexander Arvidsson
• Jason Hall
• Niko Neugebauer
• Daniel Taylor
• Nick Craver
• Constantine Kokkinos
• Kendal Van Dyke
• Jes Schultz
• Joe Sack
• John Q. Martin
• Anthony Nocentino
• John Morehouse
• Marc Gravell
• Gail Shaw

I apologize if I've left anyone out; that was just a quick inventory on my fingers (and toes; let's be honest). The point is: a lot of people have been making serious moves to better their lives and/or advance their careers. Kudos!

So why am I saying this out loud?

Well, dear reader, at the end of this month I, too, will be starting a new adventure! It's at a place I probably could have seen myself working at just about any arbitrary point over the past decade. No, it's not Microsoft; but I'll bet your second guess is Stack Overflow. I'll be joining Andy as a Staff Database Reliability Engineer, hopefully (eventually) filling some pretty big shoes left by Taryn as she heads off to make big waves at Microsoft. I wasn't aggressively looking, but this immediately struck me as a place where I could make a bigger impact than I ever could at Wayfair.

Also, direct database access will give me a much easier path to updating about 400 answers on string splitting, to highlight a recent and quiet change to the documentation: enable_ordinal is now available in Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance.