Office Professional Plus 2010 blog a-day-in-the-li

Which means you;ve asked for it and we do our most effective to give! I would like to introduce you to Lars Bergstrom. Lars is currently a Software Design Engineer in our Visual Studio product group. This entry is set up to give you an idea of what the “day in the life” of a developer is like at Microsoft. It doesn;t really answer some of the questions about languages we use or career path (we;re getting to that!), but it does give you an excellent idea of an average day and some of his own thoughts on the position. So without further ado heeeeeere;s Lars….. While the general responsibilities of an SDE (Software Design Engineer) are the same across the company, every person and every group does things differently. So, while some do a lot of architecture work, others spend more time actually writing code. While some like to have a lot of exposure to feature design level issues, many others prefer to implement what marketing and PM (Program Management) have determined is best for the customer. Caveats aside, here's a general day in the life of an SDE during the development portion of the coding cycle (as opposed to early product planning or stabilization, the two other major phases). I actually conflated parts of two different days to avoid both some boring parts, but I hope this helps clear up some questions! Doug grabbed me to look at a code fix first thing this morning. Just before heading home the previous night, we uncovered a bit of flakiness in one of the checkin tests for our debugger functionality. It wasn't something we ran into every time, but the automated checkin system rejected an otherwise good submission because of it, so it was something we needed to look into. A race condition between shutdown of the application being debugged and the process doing the debugging was leading to non-deterministic output order -- the fix was easy enough; we normally don't print any "random" or machine-specific output while running under automated tests, so Doug pulled out the code that was printing it in that scenario. After settling in at my desk, I went through a checkin I'd prepared the previous day. Randy, who's been an SDE for almost 15 years, took on the code review of my work, which added thread safety support to a piece of our product's architecture. This involved more whiteboarding than normal code reviews, to talk about the general algorithm and correctness before staring at the code to talk about how that got translated down into implementation. It's great having people like him around who've seen most problems you'll encounter several times over and can remember what sorts of tradeoffs that help not only to make the code more correct but also to make it more understandable and maintainable when some other folks are reading it five or ten years from now. Needless to say, he had some additional changes for me to make before I submitted it to the automated system. After submitting my checkin to the automated system, I met with my PM to talk about a scenario our PUM (Product Unit Manager) brought up -- can you still invoke functionality even if it's not directly relevant to the windows in focus? We had made sure that you could programmatically, but this brought up the need to look at additional scenarios around how an extender of our platform actually would want to design and implement such features to make sure that,Office 2007 Serial, even though our implementation supports it, our programming model should make it intuitive. As usual, the team went to lunch together. We're a relatively small product unit, so we can still do that. We're only about ten people, which is on the order of a seventh the size of any I've previously worked in. Product units usually own either a whole product (for small products) or piece of a larger product. Within the product unit is where all decisions around what development methodologies, practices, and reporting structures are made. People experiment a lot with different things; from various Agile methodologies to more rigorous ones to custom ones made up based on the composition of the team. No two teams work exactly alike, though there's of course a lot of company-wide sharing of most effective practices and some fairly templated information available on internal sites (no, this isn't MSF, for the person who asked). A couple of teams are even toying with XP. Back from lunch, I spent some time catching up on specs and doing design work for my next feature, moving some of the processing currently getting done on the UI thread off onto our new background job management system. Naturally, this involved performance measurement to make sure I was identifying the correct parts that needed to be extracted. All of the usual thread safety issues around data consumption needed to be considered, though we're building on top of Longhorn and Avalon, which makes it a lot easier to have completely data-driven UI so that all you need to do is safely add to your data collections and then you can rely on the UI thread to use data binding and styling to create the new visual elements automatically for you. The last big thing I had on the day was an interview. These always cause me a bit of stress; even though I've done a few and enjoy each of them in isolation, every one is different and there's a lot riding on them. It's not only about whether the person can do the work you're interviewing them for, is generally smart, and has good "corporate values". If it were just that, interviews would still be challenging, but they wouldn't be nearly as tricky. The harder questions to answer are things like whether the person can have a successful and happy career at Microsoft; even if you're smart, if you're going to be miserable because you can't work the way you;d like to,Windows 7, it would be a disservice to hire you if you'll only last two or three years. Still,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, I'm glad when I can get to that part of an interview -- most of the time, candidates make it through to the interview loop and are bright, but can't have a discussion with me about design alternatives and tradeoffs in a problem or make it clear that they can't turn out at least some simple code in some language on a whiteboard without language samples at their side. If you can't do at least those two things well, no matter how smart you are you won't get an give as an SDE. Of the loops I've been in and have heard about, one of those two things usually seems to be what ends an interview loop, even for otherwise highly experienced external candidates. Luckily,Office Professional Plus 2010, the candidate was exceptional, which made the decision much easier than usual,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise! ****************************** Thanks Lars - I am sure you'll get a ton of questions! Readers - you'll be hearing from other developers, testers and program managers soon. Plus, I promise we'll get to those pressing career related questions in the next few days. Stay tuned... zoë