A few (well maybe more than a few) things about me
Hi. My name is Glenn Block and I've been at Microsoft for almost a year. I came from the dev world where I worked in mostly small companies and startups for the past 10 years (and 1 or 2 large orgs) as a software engineer and architect. Coding is my passion, I love to make things work.
A little history...
I've been living and breathing code since I was a little kid. Back in the good old days my computer of choice was a VIC 20 that was 4.77 mhz with 4K of ram and an 8k expansion card. That was a great machine for it's time. I remember at the age of 9 the joy at being able to reprogram my character set using Peek and Poke. I also remember writing my first game on a Coco and using those same commands to poke an assembly program that would copy a video page into memory so that I could quickly recall it without having to wait for it to redraw. Back then only the most basic services were provided for you. You had to continually reinvent the wheel to achieve what you were looking for.
Now 25 years and look where we are. Developers now have an arsenal of technology at their fingertips. Sophisticated applications can now be developed in exponentially less time than it would have taken to build the most basic programs back then. It's incredible having watched the evolution of the industry to where we've reached today. Microsoft has been at the forefront of this evolution.
You name it, I've probably done it. (not literally)
For the past 10 years, I've had the priveledge of working with many different technologies and languages in very diverse environments. The last few years prior to Microsoft, I was engrossed in enterprise application development and building software frameworks.
My methodology
When it comes to software methodology, I think the best why to describe myself is a practical agilist. What I mean by this is that I am a big proponent of agile programming, but I tend to be practical about my approach to it. I am certainly not a hardcore xper, but I have definately done my share of pair-programming, CI, TDD and refactoring. Also I think that patterns are the best thing next to sliced bread. That being said I know what it means to 'crank' code and in the early years I was a cowboy.
Why I came to Microsoft
It may sound corny, but quite simply to make a difference.
Why am I the e-Learning product planner
So I can bring you, the development community the right kind of technology training that meets your needs.
What can you do?
Drop me a line and let me know what kind of areas you'd like to see us focus on, as well as what you think of our product.
Cheers