In my current job working as a software engineer on the Office Suite at Microsoft, I have seen a transformation over the last couple of years from a 3-year waterfall release cycle to a more iterative monthly release cadence. Along with this, there has also been a transition to focus on using data to drive decisions instead of developer or project manager opinions. As a believer in Agile practices and iterative design, this has been a very exciting evolution to be a part of! Microsoft still has a long way to go as an organization and as a company (so much legacy…) but it’s been great to see and experience a mostly positive trend.

I often find that in the teams I have worked on, coders tend to write a lot of bad code (myself included). Talking to my fellow coders, I often heard frustration with these codebases expressed as, “This code is so hard to change! How did it get this way? Let’s just throw it all out so we can design it right.” This is often wishful thinking, given that the same constraints and incentives will lead to the same results.

Hi readers! The idea of blogging is new to me so kind of nervous to see how this goes. My goal with this blog is to talk about some of my experiments with different web programming projects. Topics will most likely including javascript, typescript, gulp, webpack, browserify, react, redux, flux, elm, and likely others. Happy reading!