Software Engineering is hard.  Management is hard.  Managing software engineers who are managing complex problems is just plain overwhelming.  I remember when I got my first job out of college I didn’t know what was going on.  The algorithms I learned didn’t seem to apply (search algorithms? Umm in the real world we just use std::sort), and forget about anything you learned about time management.  Our projects were short lived and self-directed.  There were many times I wished I had someone to tell me what to expect.  And then just when you start getting comfortable being an “expert” at what you do, you become a manager and the game entirely changes.  It seems like there is no instruction manual and not many people around to help.  Well, I’m Robert and I’d like to help.

I’ve named this blog Code and Kindness because I think those are two of the most critical factors to having a successful career (along with Curiosity but who wants to type all of that out).  The need to be great at code is obvious, you can’t excel at software engineering without understanding the technical, but kindness is often overlooked.  Kindness to yourself to know how to take care of yourself, manage your growth and your career and also kindness to others, because communication and healthy teams rely on empathy and kindness to be effective.  I hope to share with you all I have learned along the way, and I hope to learn from others through this blog.

Education / Credentials

I graduated from Penn State University in 2007 with a B.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Mathematics. I got my first job at Microsoft where I worked in both the Windows and Office orgs on low level graphics and rendering (a lot of C/C++ using and creating DirectX and Direct Composition APIs).  After about 6 years, I decided I wanted to learn about the world outside of Microsoft, and I went to work at Google.  There, I worked in Corporate Engineering (Mostly Java and GWT).  I decided to go completely away from corporate high tech companies and worked at a small fintech company (mostly JavaScript / Angular and C# on the backend) but at the end of the day I realized I missed Seattle and Microsoft, so my wife and I decided to move back to Seattle. After evaluating my different offers I decided to join the Xbox org at Microsoft.  In the next 5 years at Microsoft, I worked on low latency video streaming, computer vision and Machine Learning, and then decided to change tracks to management.  I did some more exploring and realized I wanted to try out a medium size, close to start up but not quite startup company so I worked at Door Dash. But I then got a chance to work in Minecraft which I couldn’t pass up.  I am currently a Lead in the Bedrock platform team and specifically run the team that works on most of what you would consider the game engine for the bedrock (Non-Java Windows, Xbox, Mobile, PSX, Switch) edition(s) of Minecraft.  At night and on weekends, I am a student at the University of Washington in their Technology Management MBA program where we focus on leadership, entrepreneurship, and business.