Microsoft is like grad school

I’m having a blast here at Microsoft. The last time I had this much fun was in grad school. The hallway and lunch conversations are excellent – it’s great to be around so many smart folks.

Just the other day I went to the equivalent of a departmental colloquium. One of the devs on the CLR team gave an excellent description of how the debugging interfaces of the CLR work. In all of my time outside of the company, I’d never heard such a concise description of managed debugging, nor did I truly appreciate the challenges involved in implementing first class debugging support on the CLR.

There’s also vast intranet. You can spend months just reading interesting papers. Now that I’ve got RAS access to corpnet, I’m spending some time each evening just reading. The opportunities for personal growth here are remarkable.

While I definitely underestimated the logistical challenges involved in moving to Redmond, I’m not regretting it one bit. Slowly but surely things are coming together – our house closed in Toronto today, and we’re putting together an offer for our new house in Redmond tomorrow. Life is good.

Comments

[Jason Bock]

Congrats - sounds like you're having lots o' fun in Building...well, what building ARE you in? 42? 122?. I remember the days of grad school - getting paid to study was a blast, even if the pay wasn't that much :).

BTW any idea if there's going to be a Lang.NET 2007?

[John Lam]

I'm in 42. There's a big difference in pay between Microsoft and grad school, but you know, once you factor in the house and family I might have had more disposable income in grad school!

RE Lang.Net 2007, there should be - look for an announcement here.

[Krishna]

Is the "excellent description of how the debugging interfaces of the CLR" publically available?

[John Lam]

Mike Stall was the dev who gave the talk - there's a lot of good stuff on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/

The core debugging interfaces are also now doc'd: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/ms230588.aspx