15 Years Ago Today

  • Article

15 years ago today was my first day at Microsoft.  In the last 15 years, a lot has changed.  Here is the way things were 15 years ago:

There was no IE.  There was no Outlook.  There was no concept of mobile or digital media.

There was no Office, just separate apps like Word, Excel, Powerpoint.  There was no Visual Studio, just separate language apps.

There was no C#, .Net framework, or 64-bit anything – 32-bit was new and cool.

 

As for me, in the last 15 years:

I was an STE, SDET, and SDE while in the exact same role.

I’m the only test manager that ran the Visual Studio debugger team and the WinDBG team - the two most popular debuggers Microsoft has shipped.

I was on the Visual C++ team that created C# and managed the testing of the first Visual C# IDE (UI).

I was the person responsible for getting the first working build of the 64-bit compiler and handing it over to Windows to see how well it compiled Windows source.

I was the test manager responsible for the first N SKU Windows releases (the special ones for the EU).

The best ship-it party I attended was the free weekend trip to Coeur d’alene resort and Silverwood.