4 Years at Microsoft
I've reached a new career achievement. My tenure Microsoft is officially the longest of any job in my career. The previous record was 3 years and 9 months at Lonely Planet.
What an incredible 4 years it has been too. I thought I'd list out a few learnings in addition to the ones I wrote about last year.
Scaling is not just about the code
Just getting acclimated to the size and scale of Microsoft was quite a thing. Eventbrite during it's biggest time was 1,000 people, and I joined a company that has 250x that. What an adjustment! During the first year at Microsoft, I realized that even though I'd worked on a fairly large codebase, nothing really except for on-the-job training can teach you how to deal with this type of scale.
One of the things you can do to prepare yourself for it is to read the following book...
That book is a game changer in terms of understanding scale. What you'll immediately realize is that probably the MOST important aspect of scaling a codebase is having a good connection with the people around you. Which is exactly what I strove to do in my first year at Microsoft. I did the best I could to meet with and stay in contact with as many of the teams around me that I could. I created sync meetings with partner teams in other geos that are still on my calendar to this day.
We also setup an RFC process which helped us document and record the changes going on in our engineering system. That deserves an entire blog post in and of itself. It has really helped us capture many of the highly impactful decisions we've made over the last 4 years.
A few things I'm most proud of so far
One of the things I'm most proud of is the team I've been a part of. For the most part, the same folks, some of which I helped interview and I've been working with, are still around after all this time! I think that really says something about the type of culture we have in 1JS. Working every day with folks from all over the world really makes work fun and exciting! I've also been lucky enough to visit the folks in India twice which has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I'm proud to be a part of such a diverse group of people.
Second, we've gone through unprecedented growth since I've been here on the team. We're now the 3rd largest monorepo at Microsoft behind Windows and Office. There are over 1k developers a month contributing code in our repo, and even with all that churn, the system continues to run very well. Yes, there's lots of room for improvement, but I'm extremely proud of the work we've delivered!
One of the coolest things I got to help out on was working with Derrick Stolee on the git sizing issue we've encounter. That was something I wrote about in...
Jonathan Creamer
That project was incredibly fun and impactful.
Speaking of having impact, I've also been able to create a new OSS library for authenticating to Azure DevOps for NPM authentication which is available here.
microsoft
That solved a fairly large pain point for many of our users, which is getting their packages installed without having to jump through too many hoops to get authenticated to ADO Artifacts.
Another thing I'm super proud of is, I've been able to create a lot of great video based trainings in the last 4 years, and folks have given lots of awesome feedback about it. I figured, as a developer one of my favorite ways to learn is by watching content from places like Frontend Masters or Pluralsight, and I thought, why not try to do some of that on my own?
I created some bite sized videos in "Pluralsight style", and it's been really fun to do, and really rewarding to hear how helpful it's been for folks.
Can't wait for what's next!
There's lots of other things I could talk about, but all in all I'm just so thrilled to still be a part of the same team I joined 4 years ago, and can't wait to see what the future holds.