- Dona Sarkar recently announced that she is switching roles from Microsoft’s Insider Program to the Developer Relations team
For more than the last 3 years, Dona Sarkar has been the Chief #NinjaCat of the Insider Program at Microsoft. And now she is moving to Microsoft’s Developer Relations to head up advocacy for Citizen Developers especially how they use the Power Platform (Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Power BI). It is unknown who will be succeeding Sarkar at the Insider Program.
The Windows Insider program is an open software testing platform where users who have a valid license of Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 can register for testing out pre-release builds of the operating systems. The program launched in September 2014 and about a year later, there were 7 million people who signed up. Now there are about 17 million users. And Microsoft Office, Bing, Xbox, and Visual Studio Code also have Insider programs.
“Under Dona’s leadership, the Windows Insider program has grown and expanded to hundreds more cities and rural areas around the world,” said Microsoft Windows and Education Corporate Vice President Eran Megiddo in a blog post. “Dona’s passion for helping others learn to code and build businesses is a great match for her new role. I am so appreciative of all she’s done for the program and wish her well in her new adventure.”
Sarkar was the second Windows Insider chief after Gabriel Aul, according to ZDNet. Aul now works at Facebook as the VP of Virtual Reality Engineering.
Sarkar had originally joined the Windows team as a software engineer in 2005 and was a lead developer for Windows Vista focused on features like Bluetooth, Blu-ray integration, and Autoplay at that time. And she also worked on the developer engagement program for the HoloLens and oversaw the launch of the #HoloHacks hackathon.
