January 2025 Newsletter
Message from the co-ordinators
Happy New Year everyone!! 🎊
Wishing you all a brilliant 2025, whatever it may bring you. We’re looking forward to all the friendly chatter, brilliant advice, and complete nonsense we’ve come to expect out of this group in the year ahead. For our part we’ll keep you updated with the news and events (hopefully seeing many of you at the meet-up events), although the frequency of these newsletters might drop slightly so we aren’t spamming you quite so much. We do have some exciting ideas for this year but, as always, please get involved: chat in the Discord, share ideas with us, set-up a meetup, or get involved with some admin!
Engineering Conference?
On that note, we’ve started talking about what this community might do over the next year and we’re considering the idea of putting together an Engineering Conference of sorts since this has been a beloved event at Metaswitch for many years and we’re sure there are lots of really interesting new topics for us to hear about with many people in the community starting at new jobs in new industries. As a first step, we want to gauge interest both in attending a conference but also in helping to make it happen. We’d really appreciate you taking a few minutes to complete this form to let us know your thoughts: https://forms.gle/p6iurLSFDTPXcpFP7.
London Winter Party
We had a fantastic evening with over 140 people turning out to celebrate together! It was great to see so many faces and we enjoyed catching up with old and new colleagues and friends - thank you to all those who came along to support the event!
There is a Google Photos album at https://photos.app.goo.gl/mXriqKPC9To2QG3h7 where you can share any photos you took from the evening or view ones that other people took - we’d love to see these!
It's way too early to say whether this will be a recurring event, next year could look very different, but nonetheless we'd really like to take this opportunity to ask for some feedback on the event. A huge thank you to all those who have already gotten in touch with me about it, I've really appreciated all the kind words. If you have any feedback, I've created a short form at https://forms.gle/FvBjLo44LRc77jwB7 and I'd be very grateful for any further input.
Local Upcoming Events
Cambridge
New year new January Pub - Monday 6th January
January BOTC (Blood on the Clocktower) - Wednesday 15th January
There’s also some escape room-ing being organised, check out the post here.
Cambridge are very active so check out the #cambridge-events channel on Discord to keep up to date.
Edinburgh
January meet-up
We’re planning for our next meet-up event to be on Wednesday 15th January, hopefully at a pub in the city centre, near Waverley, although the venue is yet to be confirmed. Keep an eye on WhatsApp and the #scoff-chat channel on Discord for updates!
Enfield/London
January meet-up
With lots of ex-Metaswitchers still based in Enfield, we're organising a get together for lunch at Aksular on Friday 10th January. Check out the #enfield-london-events for details or get in touch with Ken Ferguson.
February meet-up
Belle Atkins is going to organising a dinner on Thursday 13th February at Oxford Street Market Halls ~6:15pm for anyone ex-Metaswitch/<all-previous/alternative-names>! Please save the date, and more details to follow (in #enfield-london-events)!
A reminder that there are regular lunchtime sports still going on in Enfield. Check out the #enfield-london-sports channel on Discord if you’re interested. All abilities welcome and you don’t need to be a MSFT employee to come along!
Things you can get involved with
We’re looking for a new local meetup rep for the London and/or Enfield areas so if you’re interested in helping ensure regular alumni meetups happen in this area, get in touch!
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Events round up
Edinburgh
In Edinburgh, a group of 60 current and former colleagues celebrated together with our own Winter Party on Saturday 30th November. We had welcome drinks and a buffet dinner and some great opportunities to catch up with many people! Thanks to James McDougall and Kathryn McClain for making the event happen.
Updates from the community
Job updates
There have been a couple of new job updates shared in the Discord channel lately including:
Aidan Williamson starting as a Data Engineer 2 at Skyscanner
Yuval Kramer starting at Redgate
Keith Wansbrough starting as principal engineer and architect at Moody’s Maxsight
Keep sharing your updates, we love hearing where everyone is moving to!!
Other updates
Alianza news:
For anyone who’s *somehow* missed it, Alianza have bought “Metaswitch” (https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/exclusive-alianza-buys-metaswitch-microsoft-deal-years-making). This is ongoing and affects everyone, from those moving to those who still work for Microsoft and now need to move to a new office. We wish the best to everyone.
John Lazar:
John Lazar has received a knighthood for services to engineering and technology, congratulations Sir John! (It’s a shame we aren’t planning on doing a panto…)
Scoff mountain biking trip:
The scoff mountain biking group had another one of our very infrequent days out! Hard work and a fun time was had by all. Looking forward to the next one, whenever that may be! Here is a group photo, showing a combination of current and former colleagues looking very happy with themselves.
If you have any updates that you’d like to be included in the next newsletter then email metaswitchalumni@substack.com or message Alice Walker on Discord! There’s also a #job-and-life-updates channel on Discord if you want a more low-key way of sharing news and keeping up with others.