Laziness, Impatience, Hubris

The great Larry Wall claims that these are the three great virtues of a great programmer. And I whole heartedly agree. However, If I were to propose three virtues, they’d be: Inquisitiveness, Acceptance, and Stubbornness.

My name is Tommy Falgout, I’m a new employee at Microsoft and I have no idea what I’m doing.

I don’t know .NET. Or Azure. I don’t own a Windows Phone. Heck, the last Windows OS I “owned” was XP.

What I do have is ~20 years of experience in *nix and Open Source software development. I helped develop the original SMS implementation for GSM, back when phones were only meant for voice. I wrote telecom automation systems in Perl, PHP and MySQL 3.x. I then worked at Yahoo for 9 years where I expanded my brain to build their live events engine to broadcast Obama’s Inauguration, the Royal Wedding and the NFL games (Yahoo used to own NFL streaming rights in the 2000’s) I migrated to Yahoo’s Infrastructure database which was the duct tape keeping everything together and integrated.

As a Technical Evangelist, I’m building upon all that experience as a foundation for this new opportunity. To take Azure to the next level.

The thing is…I don’t know how to Azure yet. But that’s the point of this blog. To detail my findings and explore the union of Open Source and Azure. This will be a dumping ground and lesson’s learned. I’m a big fan of transparency and learning from other people’s mistakes. My hope is that you can learn from mine.

Now to go learn how not to mangle my ARM.