Will Anderson

Starting Monday, I’m joining a new team at Microsoft. Even though I’m moving within the company, this will be a completely new experience, and I’m pumped.

What I’ve Been Doing

A year and a half ago, I joined a top-notch team working on a super secret Win8 app. A week after I started, our project was cancelled. Oops :)

Our team was part of the Bing Ads org structure, so after a few months of limbo, we took ownership of the management and authoring tools for display ads. Getting to work with this team of hand-picked developers has been an amazing experience. I’ve learned a ton about Agile methodologies, TDD, DevOps, and more.

I got to contribute to many projects in my time on the team, but here are the things I’m most proud of:

• Building a RESTful API for storing, transforming, searching, and serving image and video assets
• Building a purely static Angular SPA, backed by Node.js microservices
• Converting most of the team’s codebase to Git on Visual Studio Online, with CI through Octopus
• Becoming a team resource for Git and JavaScript domain knowledge

What’s Next

I’m joining the “Client Platform Tools” team inside DevDiv. They work on the TypeScript language and tooling, as well as the JavaScript tooling in Visual Studio, and the F12 tools in Internet Explorer.

I’ll be working on JavaScript profiling and diagnostics (think CPU/memory usage and network calls). This will be a new experience for me. I’ve spent most of the last year and a half writing JavaScript for either the browser or Node, but now I’ll be stepping a little deeper and working on the development tools themselves. I’ll also be jumping into TypeScript, the language in which most of the tools are written.

Thinking about everything I’m going to be learning about and working on, I’m excited, optimistic, and honestly a little scared.

But that’s good.

If changing teams didn’t move me outside my comfort zone, it’d be the wrong move.

I’ve found that there are two things that get me pumped about what I’m working on. The first is that it’s challenging. I love learning, and it turns out working on problems I don’t quite know how to solve is a great way to learn.

The second thing I love is doing work that makes a difference. I don’t only mean that in an altruistic sense, but in a broader, “makes someone’s job/life easier” kind of way. That’s why a developer tools team was so appealing to me, and why I’m so excited about what the next chapter will bring.