I'm an SRE / Tech lead / infrastructure goblin covered in scars from discovering many of the sharp edges of AWS and distributed systems over the years. I've worked in both the enterprise and startup-land, having spent the last several years in SaaS, helping orgs scale from thousands to billions of requests per day with tech, process, and engineering leadership.
Right now I'm most interested in the climate tech sector, but am happy to learn about any role with potentially positive social and/or ecological impact.
I'm an SRE / Tech lead / infrastructure goblin covered in scars from discovering many of the sharp edges of AWS and distributed systems over the years. I've worked in both the enterprise and startup-land, having spent the last several years in SaaS, helping orgs scale from thousands to billions of requests per day with tech, process, and engineering leadership.
Right now I'm most interested in the climate tech sector, but am happy to learn about any role with potentially positive social and/or ecological impact.
We had an escalation to "the expert" on an Azure product one time and the guy's response to one of my questions was literally "I don't know, that isn't in the PowerPoint I brought."
I feel like what we should be working towards is an integrated "problem-solving"-based curriculum. The test-based stuff has us stuck in "memorize these things" mode.
For most kids, math is way more interesting if you can move past generic formulas and into real-world use cases. I remember continually asking math teachers "And what would I use this for?" and never getting an answer which left me super-frustrated and uninterested.
Instead of breaking them out into different "tracks", integrating math, logic, and CompSci into existing courses might produce some interesting results.
Did MS ever even run an advertising campaign for Windows Phone? I don't recall ever seeing commercials or web ads explicitly for Phone. There were some that referenced it in the vein of "Here's a thing, and another thing, oh... and also this phone thing.", but I don't recall seeing anything else.
They ran an early advertisement when they actually chastised phone users for using their phones too much. I guessed then this wouldn't end well as their corporate DNA simply wouldn't let it succeed.
I think the majority of their advertising was placement ads. There are many, many TV shows that featured the characters using Windows Phones (Scandal did for the longest time, might still do).
Shows like Hawaii Five-0 and NCIS:LA have HUGE Microsoft product placement. Arrow now does as well. They use Surfaces, Windows Phones, etc.
One of the more painful product placement attempts was trying to get actors to use the expression "Bing it", as if that was ever going to catch on. (I use Bing, it's not bad, but seriously, I'm never going to say that.)
I've also seen Cortana-based video adverts, though I don't recall if they were on TV or online (also UK). They were really quite poor, didn't do anything to differentiate and just came across as a "we have Siri too!" message.
I recall tv spots in Germany for Lumia but one of them was mostly about how much better the camera is and the other was the usual cringeworthy lifestyle crap.
Really early after the Nokia acquisition they did a huge Windows phone launch push. But they never really did a sustained campaign as far as I can tell.
I've come away from some of these types of books with some good tidbits, but have a hard time recommending them, especially to a young person. They tend to be a gateway drug into a culture of "The secret to making money is giving me some money." that I'm not comfortable with. I'd be far more comfortable recommending something data driven like "The Millionaire Next Door" (regardless of how that book is marketed) that highlights things like frugality, saving, and hard work.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Unlikely
Technologies:AWS, CDK, Kubernetes, Postgres, incident response, myriad "DevOpsy" things
Résumé/CV: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/083RF-fth1DRTl5zdMZsrItNQ... or https://www.linkedin.com/in/doddschris/
Email: chris@focusfire.net
I'm an SRE / Tech lead / infrastructure goblin covered in scars from discovering many of the sharp edges of AWS and distributed systems over the years. I've worked in both the enterprise and startup-land, having spent the last several years in SaaS, helping orgs scale from thousands to billions of requests per day with tech, process, and engineering leadership.
Right now I'm most interested in the climate tech sector, but am happy to learn about any role with potentially positive social and/or ecological impact.