Rethinkify

Microsoft is one of the world's great companies. The challenge is the sheer scale: you work on systems with hundreds of millions of users, and you have to stay aligned with thousands of colleagues across every time zone. It is an intense experience, and no other company I know comes close to that level of immersion. I honestly don't know where the last 10+ years went.

1. 2024

   Helping develop Oxidizer — the Rust Substrate services framework used to power some of Microsoft's most mission-critical services.

   Wrote Oxidizer components and optimised performance, and worked with partner teams to replace existing C# services with Rust.

2. 2022

   Improved Windows-on-Arm for developers.

   Wrote the Windows-on-Arm64 backend for the GNU toolchain, working closely with the upstream and downstream open-source compiler communities as a member developer on Linaro's compiler team. Along the way I got a solid grasp of the Arm architecture, and trained and coached developers on Arm and Qualcomm hardware across GPU, SIMD, CPU and NPU/DSP.

3. 2020

   Sabbatical in Australia.

4. 2018

   Led the Teams Desktop Development Team in Prague.

   Owned the native desktop code in Microsoft Teams — Windows, Mac and Linux — the infrastructure behind over 200 million active users. I worked with more than 20 separate teams to enable platform-specific features, and led hardware video rendering in an internal fork of Chromium across CPU/GPU, Direct3D and OpenGL. I took desktop reliability from 99.9 to 99.99 by setting up a native crash SWAT team, and led Teams for Linux — the first Linux application in Microsoft Office. I also led Microsoft's engagement with the Electron open-source community, regularly attending events and joining the Electron administration board.

5. 2015

   Led development and optimisation of Skype user-data backend services.

   Debian/C++ and Azure/C#, running at 50k TPS and serving hundreds of millions of users.

6. 2013

   Led a team (9 devs) building C/C++ NPAPI web browser plugins for video calling.

   Powered Skype, Lync and Facebook video calling for tens of millions of users. Kept critical functionality available by successfully transitioning to WebRTC. Optimised video rendering using SIMD, Direct3D, OpenGL and other platform hardware support.

Coached clients to be more productive using agile methods, providing training in TDD, refactoring, CI and test automation. Mostly C++ and C# projects. Demonstrated improved cycle times and quality metrics, and leveraged a strong technical background to bridge the management and developer worlds.

Back in those days, Thoughtworks was a real leader in the industry. I met some amazing people and learnt more than at any other point in my career.

Led C++ desktop development of graphical process-modelling software through multiple full lifecycle releases. Introduced agile methods to the company, improving quality with 60% fewer QA and user-reported bugs. Wrote a 2D rendering framework optimised for available hardware.

Casewise was the most fun company I ever worked at, largely because of George Keeling, the founder. He was my boss for most of the time — completely high-energy crazy in a good way. It was a small company, and my colleagues and I did some amazing work; maybe the most enjoyable and productive period of my career.

Graduated as part of one of QUT's pioneering cohorts shortly after it gained university status. Built a solid foundation in computer science back when the Intel 486 was the absolute pinnacle of new technology, which means my ability to adapt and learn new frameworks has been tested across three decades of continuous change.

It is an extremely beautiful campus in the centre of Brisbane, if you ever get the chance to visit.