We make dreams come true. I can recall three childhood dreams. If you know me, you can probably guess most, if not all of them. Becoming a professional tennis player is the unreachable one at this point in my life. That’s okay, I can live with that. However, I had been able to live my second dream for eight years. I can still picture it in my mind. The end of the fifth grade was approaching. My classmates and I were sitting in the classroom with the windows open trying to catch some breeze on that hot day of June 1992. The teacher walked in, picked up the chalk and wrote on the green chalkboard the topic for the quarterly essay. It read “A postcard from _________”. We were given freedom to write a postcard from any place we wished, even imaginary one. Without much hesitation I started writing a postcard from Florida as if I have ever even been outside of former Yugoslavia or Hungary. Twelve years later, I wrote a real postcard to my parents from Orlando. Childhood dream number two, checked! Here comes the tie breaker. Interestingly, this one coincides with the fifteenth anniversary of my arrival to US at the Dulles airport in DC. It has taken a lot of “blood, sweat, and tears” to realize the third childhood dream, becoming a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I was raised on milk and Microsoft technologies. They are both part of my DNA. The bond is so strong that I was willing to trade life in Florida (dream #2) for moving to Redmond, WA and working as a Software Development Engineer II for Commerce Platform team at Microsoft.

It was not an easy decision to leave my wife, house, friends, colleagues, ONETUG, and Orlando behind. This is an enormous sacrifice that I would not have taken for any other company other than Microsoft. Satya’s vision of mobile-first and cloud-first vision as well as his desire to change the culture inspire me. We are witnessing the re-birth of Microsoft that may not happen ever again in our lifetime. This is arguably the second best time to be on the team Microsoft.