Celebrating my 5th year at Microsoft by developing AI skills
In many ways, after 5 years at Microsoft, I still feel like I just started yesterday. Especially given the immense changes that AI is bringing to our day to day lives as Software Engineers.
I have been so fortunate to be a part of an incredible organization at Microsoft called ES365 focusing on the developer tooling and experience of frontend developers working on our flagship web products including Copilot, Teams, WXPOV (Word, Powerpoint, Excel Onenote, Visio), and so much more. I've been through 2 promotions in 5 years landing the Principal role most recently.
The team I'm on, 1JS, is a phenomenal team with folks from every corner of the globe, not just my immediate 1JS team based out of Redmond, but our global 1JS team of about 50 in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Kenya, and India.
Developing AI Skills
I'm also fortunate to be a part of an organization that is evolving with the AI landscape, and leading the charge with things like our internal CLI, Agency, which gives Microsoft engineers a single consistent way to interact with all the latest and greatest AI models and tools like Github Copilot CLI, and Claude CLI, and comes preconfigured with all kinds of cool MCP servers for making working in huge codebases much easier.
We're encouraged to use AI in as much of our work as we can, and are having tons of great internal learning events hearing from all sorts of folks, and our upcoming annual FHL.
In the past few weeks I've been learning about Skills, turning every day tasks like creating daily logs, pushing PRs, and so much more into markdown files that help Github and Claude both know how to easily automate. I've setup my dotfiles repo again to refresh my knowledge of things like Tmux so I can have lots of pains open with different agents running all kinds of different tasks. We've even released a WorkIQ MCP server that they ship with agency that connects through all of the Microsoft graph and can help summaries emails, teams, calendar events, and virtually anything.
Overall I'm extremely excited for what all these new tools can do to help me get through my backlog, and they'll be many more blob posts to come on cool things I'm learning!
