Steps of Rome, San Francisco

drwill — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:24:00 GMT

The first night of my trip to MDC, I took 3 friends to Steps of Rome for dinner. If you've been there, you know that there are two restaurants right next to each other owned (supposedly) by the same people both called Steps of Rome. One is the bar and the other the trattoria. I've always been to the bar because the trattoria was closed during my first two visits.

I intended to take us to the bar once again. The atmosphere is spectacular, the waiters are hilarious, and the music is fun. But, as we step out of the cab, the Italian host from the trattoria convinces the female of the party to go there. I object, but the waiter will have none of it. I guess he just won't take no for an answer.

Well, I'm glad I've tried the trattoria now. We had such a great time that night. The food was to die for, and though the atmosphere is different than the bar, it's no less enjoyable. Just different. We had a reasonably quiet dinner upstairs of this tiny little building. The waiter made it his personal goal to make sure I could say that his turf was better than next door; apparently they have an ongoing feud. The kitchen staff watched us eat through the doorway in anticipation to watch our faces as we ate.

We took a party of 16 back to the trattoria on Friday night. They could barely fit us all in - indeed we had very little room to move. But the food!

Introduction

drwill — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:30:00 GMT

My name is David R. Williamson and I work at Microsoft in the Visual Studio group working on Enterprise Test Tools.

Software testing is my gig because I'm really passionate about software that works. As a software user, I get easily annoyed with bugs and poorly designed UI. Anything that slows me down from getting what I want done is just unacceptable. So, as a software engineer my mission is to prevent and find the bugs and annoying behavior early enough so the team can fix it. I'm also passionate about improving engineering practices to yield better productivity and a predictable development cadence.

My career in software development started in Product Support Services. I answered daily calls to Microsoft's support department for Windows 95 just as it launched. It was an amazing opportunity to learn about Windows and talk to customers first hand. (It was also an opportunity to learn how to prank my friends' computers which has brought endless enjoyment.) Starting out there was important in my development because I learned right away the pain software users go through when things don't go the way we want. After about a year of that, I decided it was time to get to work on finding the problems so my customers would be happy and not have to call in. Ever since, I've been a tester and a programmer. My role has changed over the years some, but the heart of my passion is still around raising the quality bar.

Today I'm an Engineering Lead. I manage a team of developers and testers at the feature level. I love both sides of development and quality assurance, so this is the perfect role for me. I enjoy working with individuals to help them grow and find the right opportunities for them to develop. I strive to create an engineering environment where both dev and test feel they are contributing to an amazing product, making steady progress towards the product deliverables, and enjoying their time doing it.

Cheers,

Dave

drwill's daemon : Misc

Steps of Rome, San Francisco

Introduction