More about John Lawrence

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I realized recently that people reading my blog probably have no clue who I am or why I'm blogging about the things they're reading, so here's an attempt to fill everyone in.

What do I do?
I'm a Development Manager for Visual Studio Team System - specifically, I am the development manager for Team Foundation Server. I started off working with the team creating the Work Item Tracking components of Team Foundation, and consquently my blog focuses a lot on the work item features of Team Foundation. The team was originally working on an internal issue tracking tool. The code for that tool has become the basis for our Work Item Tracking platform in Team System. I'm really fortunate to have a great bunch of developers in my team who really understand what it takes to create a high performance, highly scalable work item tracking database - our internal tool is used by enormous product groups like Office and Windows - which makes my job a lot easier.

How did I get here?
I used to work in the pro-audio industry as a dev lead on a Windows based digital audio workstation product called SADiE. Music is one of my passions, so I had great fun doing this for a number of years. All good things come to an end though, so eventually I moved to Entropic, a startup in Cambridge working on speech recognition, to head up a team producing a set of tools for authoring Speech Recognition applications. Entropic were acquired by Microsoft at the end of 1999. The project I was working on on morphed a number of times along the way to eventual become the Speech Application SDK.

More personal stuff
I'm originally from the UK, but I love being over here in Redmond with my wife & two young children. (It may suprise folks to hear that British weather is even worse than Seattle weather...). I still love music (playing, writing & listening to a hugely eclectic range of styles). Like most of us who work here, I'm also an unashamed geek - I love technology, gadgets, playing Xbox & I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than being at the cutting edge of software development.