Life as a Developer

I came in a bit late today (a bit past 10). I had expected to meet with the mentor that just moved over to the Xbox group (Steve S.) for lunch. But he was swamped (there are only two of them there due to the holidays, out of the standard ten or so), so...

I was at the morale event until 2PM. Once back at work, most of my dev time was spent trying to figure out a data retrieval problem (I suspect some information that I need is manually entered, rather than stored in the tables-- I have a few ideas about...

One thing that I've noticed coming over to a smaller team is the lack of email. I used to get around 100 emails a day (including internal aliases, this jumps to 300-500. Discussions on everything from XBox games, algorithm creation, performance tuning...

More work on the project. I finally figured out how to get the master page for the website working on my test server, and am in the process of getting the first page of the wizard hooked up. When I started this, I was worried that it’d be a boring...

More time spent on the middle tier today. Fun, fun C# Ever have one of those bugs that resolves itself while you explain it to someone? Yeah, I think everyone has. I was inserting into a parent table, retrieving the new GUID, and then inserting...

Well, its been a week since I wrote my introduction (and a few hours since I posted it). Below is a synopsis for how my first week went. But first, a few impressions. After I came to Microsoft as a writer, I found that my real passion was coding. I...

Hello. My name is Tom Mathews, and I've just begun as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) at Microsoft. I have a background in development (spent five years at places like Best Western and Universal Studios), but I've spent the last five years working...