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Eight years at Microsoft

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On 22nd of December 1997 I attended new hire orientation and then walked into the building 4, looking for my manager in the Visual Interdev HTML editor team. As it was close to holidays  I didn't find many people there :-), but fortunately, my lead was still around, albeit leaving for the holiday break as well. Hence, I was told to go read some docs, settle in, and get back in January. I did spend those weeks settling in, buying a car, looking for a new home, getting my immigration papers, applying for social security number, etc, etc. So normally I bring some sweets for my co-workers first working day of January as otherwise no one will eat them :-) I don't follow Microsoft tradition bringing as many pounds of M&Ms as years served, I usually try to bring something more interesting, like Russian chocolate, for example or some Hawaiian macadamia nuts, that sort of thing.

Today I am still with Web Tools, now I am lead of the editor team I joined back then and we still have four people from the original VID team on board. I worked in buldings 4, 44, 10, 41, 42 and briefly in RedWest campus. This does not include moves inside the same building :-). On average I guess our team has been changing offices about once a year. My first machine was (I think) 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM, with and some small disk (I don't even remember, 5GB maybe?) with 17" 1024x768 monitor. When I needed to repro a bug on some obscure setup, like Korean Win98 or NT5 Beta (yes, it was still called NT5 back then), I had to walk to bulding 2, where the test lab was located. Now, of course, I just TS to the repro machine comfortably sitting in my office in from of the 20" LCD.

It has been a long time, but I still like my job, We work with native C++, COM, ATL, managed designers, ASP.NET runtime and controls, XML, CSS and lots of interesting and cool stuff. So expect more blogging about Web Tools next year :-)

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