Microsoft
I joined Microsoft in the spring of 2019, excited by the opportunity to develop platform features to enable game
developers deliver games to millions of players all around the world. Up until this point in my career, I have focused
on building low-level engine modules to empower gameplay programmers and designers to realize their vision of a game.
Seeing the end result and knowing that a game world is running on a foundation that you helped build is deeply
satisfying. That being said, my impact was limited to the handful of titles which my employer developed. With this in
mind, there is no way I would pass up a chance to write low level code that would support countless games spanning every
conceivable genre on Xbox and Windows!
In the role of Senior Software Engineer on the GXP team, I design and implement game platform APIs which are in use on
Windows and multiple generations of Xbox consoles. These modules are primarily leveraged by titles to communicate with
the underlying operating system. The interfaces that I am responsible for perform critical tasks including:
- Managing global display state, including handling HDR and DolbyVision when needed.
- Allocation and tracking of in-game users and handling controller association.
- Enabling games to seamlessly transfer execution to new processes (as often seen in bundles).
My API ownership includes the responsibility of building and maintaining test coverage, as well as helping ensure that
our partners are able to accomplish their goals on our platforms. This work often involves communicating directly with
external developers to diagnose problems without having access to game code (or sometimes even a way to reproduce the
issue). This experience has done wonders for my theorycrafting skills. I have gotten much better at quickly zeroing in
on viable solutions despite not always having the luxury to exhaustively inspect a given problem.