Introducing the Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Chris Mason

Why do you want to join the ALM Rangers?

I have a passion and  for building great software and I want to help as many others as I can to do the same. Ideally, I want to join the Rangers because I want to surround myself with the best and brightest in this field. My goal is to learn as much as I can from the others, grow my career, and be able to contribute back to the community to help drive the best patterns and practices around ALM and enable others to stay on the cutting edge of ALM theory.

Who are you?

I have been working in the software industry for 12+ years now and I have spent the vast majority of that time working in and around the government space, both as a government employee and as a contractor. For the past 2 years I have been an Application Development Manager with Microsoft’s Premier Support for Developers. I started as a software engineer and worked through senior engineer to architect. Before joining Microsoft, most of my work has been based around the Microsoft technology stack and I have often been the voice to adopt tools such as TFS for our ALM needs.

Outside of work, I have a number of other activities to keep me busy. I enjoy biking, fencing, card magic, and music. I have played the piano for over 20 years and love attending different shows (the picture included is me at the first of 4 nights seeing Wagner’s Ring)

What makes you “tick”?

As I said above, when it comes to work, what makes me “tick” is a passion of building great software. I take the success of projects a lot more personally that I realistically should, so I obsess over them to produce the best product possible. As an architect, this meant smart, flexible design and from an ALM perspective, using the right set of tools and processes to build high quality software.

Where do you live?

I live in the Washington DC area.

What is the best Rangers project you worked with and why?

I have not worked on any projects yet, but I have taken advantage of a few different ones in the past. This include the branching guidance, planning guide, and more recently the migration of legacy release management assets to use the new vNext release system.

 

This post is part of an ongoing series of Rangers introductions. SeeRanger Index (Who is Who?)for more details.