Meet 'Colin Beales', he's an ADC.

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This weeks interview is from Colin Beales.

 

  1. Hello, who are you?

Erm Colin Beales.

  1. Have you always worked in the ADC Team?

No, Whilst I joined Microsoft directly out of college (a Microserf!) I did a few years in the Visual C++ team and the COM team before transferring to ADC land to do consultancy.

  1. What sort of technologies do you use as an ADC?

A bit of everything it seems. Whether it be the tools or technologies we make, or the platforms or servers as an ADC at some point or another you’ll probably have some contact with many of them.

  1. What do you enjoy about working at Microsoft?

It has to be the people I come into contact with. I have a great bunch of customers doing some really exciting projects in their respective industries, but also the colleagues I work with are mega talented and I can’t help but learn from them all.

  1. How do you keep skills up to date with the latest technologies?

Quite simply I don’t ;-) But let me clarify that....the rate in which technologies come out you just simply can’t learn everything so you learn to pick your technology battles that you can gain a bunch of deep technical knowledge on. I tend to like to pick up technologies through pet projects, but nothing prepares you for any technology quite like interacting with our customers on them.

  1. What software do you use as part of your role?

Spend most of my time in amongst the VSTS tools and servers and in front of Outlook. But as I mentioned we come into contact with a lot of the Microsoft stack so it varies dramatically. Those who know me well will know I like to avoid databases if possible (and mostly it’s not!) and if you see me in front of any design tools like expression then that would be a shock (and probably a huge waste of product to produce something with huge buttons on)

  1. How would you describe a typical day as an ADC?

If anyone reading this has read any of the previous ADC entries I guess they have all said “there is no typical day”. I’ll be a little different on this and just say every day is different J

  1. What’s your technology of the moment?

My technology of the moment is Team Foundation Server (actually this has been my technology for some time now). It’s awesome that Microsoft now has a great end-end story on ALM through an extremely flexible toolset.

  1. What’s your best and worst moment as an ADC?

My best moment was working on a development project surrounding child safety. I was a very humbling experience to be working on something for the greater good. My worst experience was pranging a car on a customers in their car park and having to go to reception to sign in for the day and admit what I’d just done.

  1. Thanks for your time; do you have a closing comment?

TFS Rocks! J