One of the cool things about being a student advocate (apart from all the free t-shirts) is that you get to meet several interesting people from inside the B0rg cube. Person in question: Tyson Dowd. He runs the academic developer program for Asia and Australia (APAC). This afternoon, I wandered into my local Microsoft office for yet another student champ meeting. Usually, these are dull, dreary things - probably because I do most of the talking at these meetings. But today, all of us (the student advocates) were in for a treat.
After some chit-chat with Kevin D'Souza (our Academic Evangelist), in strides someone you would probably expect to see at a beach party rather than at a Microsoft office. Dressed in loose slacks and with a pierced eyebrow, Tyson is not exactly your run-of-the-mill Microsoft employee. With a booming Aussie accent (he's from Down Under), he introduced himself to all of us. To cut a long story short,this is one unique guy. Apart from having worked with Jim Miller on the CLR even before it was called the CLR, he has written a language . He said nonchalantly "I was fooling around..so I wrote a GC and a RTTI system for a Prolog like language". He has also traveled to 6 continents. In fact, he quips "All those penguins in Antarctica - Microsoft should really go there". And yes - he has a typical Aussie sense of humor.
I thought I'd pull out some interesting snippets from the 1.5 hour session we had from him.
On Lightning/Project 42
Tyson worked on the CLR team with Jim Miller and others in the early stages of .NET. "This was before it was called .NET or even NGWS. I think it was called Project 42 or Lightning"", he said. "Jim Miller is a really smart guy. If you go and tell him you need opcode X to be added, he'll tell you all the reasons why you need it - and the problems they would cause and why you can't add it"
On Microsoft parties
Tyson sure inspired a lot of students in that room to try and work for Microsoft. He spoke about the things that had to be done to make sure employees stayed with Microsoft though they were getting amazingly enticing offers in the dotcom boom days. "People would say - here's this company here - and they have ..like Aerosmith playing on Fridays. So Microsoft had to keep up". Particularly interesting were the stories of all the wild parties especially when a product was shipped.
I really regret not making it to the Imagine Cup finals last year - especially after hearing accounts of the Imagine Cup parties. Things like Brazilian women, kung fu, gliders inside discotheques, women climbing ropes upside down were mentioned (as well as a lot of other stuff which really can't be reproduced here :-) )
On Microsoft the company/the people
The funniest thing we heard from Tyson today was the story of the guy on the Word team who "owns English". This guy controls which words go into the Word dictionary. He probably plays a bigger role than the Oxford English Dictionary as words are deemed wrong if they cause red squiggles. So if this guy doesn't like a word, then that word would cease to exist for millions of people. What a concentration of power! And since the guy is an Aussie, don't be surprised if you see a lot of Aussie slang popping up as suggestions.
And talking of Word suggestions,I learnt something interesting about it. Did you know that Word will never suggest swear words as suggestions if you make a spelling mistake?Yet, if you write a swear word, it won't flag it as a spelling mistake.Interesting!