It’s been about 3 years since I built a monster of a desktop machine with water cooling, fans, LEDs and all that. Long time readers will remember the disastrous outcome of that adventure as the liquid leaked, drown my electronics, and caused me to essentially abandon the thing. I somewhat recovered from the fiasco by purchasing a new motherboard, and trying to limp along with various of the components from that original build. Recently, I decided to throw in the towel and start from scratch. This time around, I decided to go with an AMD build, because AMD seems to be doing some good stuff with their Ryzen and beyond chippery. So, I put together a rig around a Ryzen 7, 32Gb RAM, same old nVidia 1060 video card. Upgraded the SSD to the latest Samsung 980? or whatever it is.

I joined the Office of the CTO at Microsoft just over two years ago. I was a ‘founding member’ as Kevin Scott was a new CTO for Microsoft. I have now moved on to another job, in a different CTO Office (Mark Russinovich in Azure).

I noticed one thing while I was in OCTO, I essentially stopped blogging. Why was that? Well, probably the main reason is the fact that when your in that particular office, you’re privy to all sorts of stuff, most of it very private, either to Microsoft, or other partners in the industry. Not really the kind of stuff you want to write about in a loud way. My colleague Mat Velosso managed to maintain a public voice while in the office, but I didn’t find I could do it. Now as it turns out, my new job is all about having a voice, and helping to make Engineering at Microsoft that much better.

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated April 4th, 1968. That was 51 years ago today. In order to commemorate his passing, I penned the following and shared it with my coworkers at Microsoft.

On this very important day in history, I am contemplative. As we consider the importance of naming our ERG, I am reflective upon how we got here.