Five for Friday – October 19, 2018

I feel like today’s a good day to share a few stories about my first few months at Microsoft, and the (very) small part I played in shipping Windows 95. My start at Microsoft is a story on its own, and probably worth recapping here in an abbreviated form. I started at Microsoft in January…

As I’m writing this (or at least starting to write this), I’m on a plane from Frankfurt to JFK airport in New York (where I will catch another flight home to Seattle). I was in Frankfurt for the first ever German Testing Day event. The event is put on by the same folks that put…

I took some time off from speaking (too much) at conferences over the past few years. I spoke at TestBash Philadelphia a year ago (and also spoke at the Online Test Conference last summer), but 2017 (and, IIRC, 2016) have been light on me in terms of external speaking. But I’m going to kick off…

I meant to post this a few days ago, but I just passed my one-year anniversary on the Lync (formerly Office Communicator) team. I enjoyed my time in the engineering excellence team at Microsoft, but I didn’t realize how much I missed being part of a software team until, well – a year or so…

49 days until the US Presidential election. If you’re reading this in the US, make sure you’re registered – and double check your registration frequently. You can register, and confirm that you’re registered on vote.org I guess code for Windows XP leaked somewhere on the internet. I doubt it’s helpful (or interesting) given that XP…

I have half a dozen different blog posts started but I thought I’d write this one instead. When you listen to customer feedback, you need to treat the good and the bad equally. If some customers say “wow – this is awesome”, and some others say “this is awful – are you on crack?”, either…