Category: Tech Insights

2017 was a year of change, personal and professional.  I started the year in San Francisco, working at Twitter as an Individual Contributor, and in a long term relationship.  I ended the year in Seattle, working at Microsoft Research as a Lead, sans that long term relationship, and a brand…

When I started writing Go in May, I found a lot of useful documentation on Getting Started with Go.  However, I found recommendations on testing best practices lacking.  So I decided to write down what I pieced together, and create a Github Repo of a base project with examples.  Essentially…

2015 has been a whirlwind of a year, which started off in a new city, with a new job as the Tech Lead of  Observability at Twitter.  The year was full of travel spanning 10 states, 3 different countries, and 2 continents.  This year I also had numerous opportunities to…

Over the past year, prior to leaving 343, I spent a large amount of time working with the WebSockets protocol and upgrading the Halo Services to support it.  In order to solidify my knowledge and provide a handy refresher for when this information invariably gets context switched out of my…

Over the past few weeks I have been asked over a dozen times how I got into the Games Industry, so I thought I would write it down. TLDR; My first Console was a SNES.  I learned to program in High School. I attended Cornell University and got a B.S….

About a year ago my software engineering team, the Azure Sphere Security Services (AS3) team, found ourselves struggling with our design document process.  So we ran an experiment, moving all our design documents to be written in Markdown, checked into Git, and reviewed via a pull request (PR). The experiment…

After the announce of the Orleans preview, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter.  One comment in particular caught my eye. .NET’s actor model uses static factories, RPC Interfaces and code-gen client proxies for comms, WCF all over again: http://t.co/PyIq291Kvh — Demis Bellot (@demisbellot) April 3, 2014 I think…

At 3am PST November 5th 2012 I sat fidgeting at my desk at 343 Industries watching graphs of metrics stream across my machine, Halo 4 was officially live in New Zealand, and the number of concurrent users began to gradually increase as midnight gamers came online and began to play….

Over the past 3.5 years my career has grown and transformed from Individual Contributor (IC) to an Engineering Manager of multiple teams, and all the roles in between as I built the Azure Sphere Security Services (AS3) Team from 2 people to 20 people.  I undertook this journey in the…

I’m often asked how to get started with Distributed Systems, so this post documents my path and some of the resources I found most helpful.  It is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list. It is worth noting that I am not classically trained in Distributed Systems.  I…