I came to computers late, in my final year of my Physics degree, when my father got me a Casio programmable calculator with BASIC on it. I have never wanted to do anything but software since! After undergraduate/graduate studies in Computer Science I pursued further studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. The courses I took involved cognitive science and computer science and I gravitated toward distributed AI and machine learning. I ran the Distributed Agents Lab as the research project manager at Carnegie Mellon for a number of years.
I always liked building stuff and during the “dot com” boom decided to strike out on my own, building a 250 person company that did B2B software as a co-founder and CTO. I liked the startup life so worked on a couple in the Web services and SAAS arena before an old buddy convinced me join Microsoft. At Microsoft I gravitated towards research oriented stuff, working in the HCI/Search area before coming to the Open Source Software Lab.
I love working here – not only do I get paid to work closely with cool technologies and cool people but I get to pontificate and interact with the OSS community & bring their concerns to the Microsoft world. Someone pinch me!