The last few years have been ... interesting, for lack of a better term. After basically checking out from social media, in about July of 2020 when the world starting dealing with pandemics, lockdowns, social unrest, I decided to just focus on work and family. It didn't help that around this same time the publishing pipeline for this website was inadvertently deleted. But Now that I'm back, figured I'd use this opportunity to document what I've been up to for the last few years.

• The science behind semantic search: How AI from Bing is powering Azure Cognitive Search - March 2021
  Got to work with the Azure Cognitive Search team and test their new semantic search capabilities on Microsoft Docs. It was amazing to see how AI can make search results more relevant and meaningful for our users. We enabled features like semantic re-ranking, instant answers on Microsoft Learn's site search, and saw big improvements in clickthrough rate. It was a great learning experience and I'm glad we were one of the first adopters of this awesome cloud service. This work led to a promotion to Principal Software Engineer.
• Launched Microsoft Q&A - January 2023
  After starting the special project team a few years ago, they eventually asked me to become a manager and keep leading the team that built and launched Microsoft Q&A, a site where users can get fast access to questions and answers about Microsoft products and technologies. It's a global, community-driven platform that uses AI to provide high-quality technical answers. We support a wide range of Microsoft products, such as Azure, .NET, Microsoft 365, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and more. The launch went great and it's been an incredible experience woerking with our community to keep improving.
• Microsoft Learn announces Microsoft Q&A Assist - May 2023
  Microsoft regularly conducts hackathons for engineers to learn new things and explore new ideas. I wanted to experiment with integrating AI-based features and brought together a hackathon team that made it to the semi-finals of the hackathon doing so! The project ended up being chosen for investment and I worked with a cross-org team to build Q&A Assist, a new feature for Microsoft Q&A that uses AI to help users find the technical answers they need faster and easier. Some of the AI-powered features include helping users ask the right question, finding existing answers to similar questions, and generating an AI-powered answer from multiple Microsoft Learn sources. Q&A Assist is currently available in limited preview and will be widely available in the coming months. It's part of Microsoft Learn's commitment to empowering learning through AI innovation and offering the best search experience for our users ... and has been an incredible opportunity to learn for me and my team.

So I'm very excited about the upcoming projects, and I'm grateful to be working with amazing folks.