Meet 'James World', he's an ADC.
- Hello James World, can tell us a little about yourself?
I joined Microsoft and the ADC Team back in 2002. Previously, I worked on Dell’s e-commerce web site and back-end systems and before that in numerous development and architecture roles. My love affair with computers began in 1980 when I was just six years old and my mother bought my father a ZX Spectrum for Christmas. Before long it was moved into my bedroom as my father was getting tired of trying to throw me out of his study! I have fond memories of hacking away at Spectrum BASIC, typing endless pages of hex codes for machine code programs from magazine listings and then moving on to Z80 assembler with the OCP assembler editor. I actually jumped straight from there to an Amiga A500 and then on to PCs. My first paid work was developing a Fox Pro database to store information on tropical medicine diseases for the British Army. It was a holiday job arranged by my father to keep me out of trouble when I was an unruly 16 year old!
- What sort of technologies do you use as an ADC?
Well, pretty much all Microsoft development technology at some point or other. Right now, I’m spending time looking at ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, SharePoint and the excellent new GDR release of VSTS 2008 for DB Professionals.
- What do you enjoy about working at Microsoft?
First and foremost the people – my colleagues are some of the most passionate and smart people in the business, and always keen to help out or engage in interesting debates. Secondly, the technology – there is a constant stream of exciting innovations coming out of our development teams. Finally, while we are given a lot of individual responsibility for our customer’s satisfaction, we are also giving a lot of trust and flexibility in how we go about achieving that. This gives me a great sense of freedom and a real drive to meet and exceed my customer’s expectations in a way that is right for them.
- How do you keep skills up to date with the latest technologies?
Personally, I am a big fan of sitting at the keyboard and programming along following books or online tutorials. A challenge in my role is that many of the technologies I need to look at don’t have books or tutorials, so I often find myself picking through blog postings from the product teams, Channel 9 videos, MSDN articles and other early adopting forum postings and blogs to grok new technology. Every so often, we are lucky enough to get the chance to meet with product team members directly! And if that opportunity isn’t available, I can always drop them an e-mail or jump onto one of our very active internal newsgroups where the product groups are usually found lurking! We have a great learning library at Microsoft UK as well, and I regularly browse the new material there to stay abreast of new technology outside of my core focus.
- What software do you use as part of your role?
Well, apart from the blindingly obvious - I am a Resharper fan and I use Sparx Enterprise Architect for software design. I really love the new release of VSTS DB Pro Edition which really takes the pain out of DB development. My most loaded software is without doubt Outlook – Microsoft is an organisation populated by e-mail addicts! I have invested a lot of time making the most out of Outlook – it’s amazing what it can do to help you keep on top of things. I am constantly learning about helpful features in Outlook I never knew were there. For instance, today I discovered that if I go into the “details” section of a contact, I can put in their birthday and it automatically shows up on the calendar – how cool is that? Simple stuff, but dead handy.
- How would you describe a typical day as an ADC?
With great difficultly – the role is so varied that there are no typical days! I might be taking part in an architectural round table for a customer one day, or presenting a workshop the next, running a performance lab the day after that and learning a new technology the day after that! Ploughing through the e-mails is a daily evil - but every day brings something new and interesting to my attention.
- Thanks for your time; do you have a closing comment?
// End of interview
How’s that? J Sorry I couldn’t resist a geek joke.