Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve been at Microsoft for over 9 years and in that time, I’ve worked on a bunch of different teams. However, I never went out and LOOKED for a new team. I was just moved around in reorgs. That kept me generally happy and I got to peak inside a bunch of different organizations. The key thread through all of those jobs as BI (business intelligence.) I spent a lot of time on Power Query and the language research that led into. Then Power Query joined in with the whole Power BI effort and I moved from the Power Query team into a data engineering/analytics team. Over those years my job title changed from Test Engineer to Test Lead to Software Engineer. All of these changes have been good and have increased my knowledge. This latest team, Power BI, has been really awesome. We went from nothing to a shipping product in about a year and we’re really shaking things up. This is almost certainly Microsoft’s next billion dollar business. (Go sign up. It’s free and easy. http://powerbi.com)

One of the great things about being in a company like this is the opportunity for changing teams without changing companies. There are SO many things that I want to work on in this company that I’ll never scratch the surface. All it takes to change teams is a few emails, some interviews and bam, new job.

So for the first time in 9 years, I took advantage of that opportunity and I’m voluntarily changing to a new team. I’m going to stay in the big data technology space, but I’m swithcing to the Azure Compute team. This is one of the core groups inside of Microsoft Azure. Azure is the cloud computing offering from Microsoft. It started 4 years after the more popular “Amazon Web Services”, but it’s rapidly catching up according to Gartner’s latest report. You can also check out some of the recent financial disclosures to understand how Azure is one of the key bets for the future of the company and it’s going exceedingly well.

My new group handles the vast number of physical and virtual machines that are at the heart of the service. And my specific team is focused on customer analytics. Are you getting what you pay for when you use Azure? What areas are good or painful? What features can we add to make it even better? There is a LOT of telemetry and feedback data available and I’m eager to dip my hands into that pot.

While this feels like a brand new job, it’s awesome that my paycheck, benefits, title and commute are unchanged. Thanks to Microsoft for giving me so many opportunities to pursue my interests!

Before you take off on a flight, you’ll hear “Flight attendants, arm and cross check doors for departure” and then when you land you hear a similar message about disarming the doors. Have you ever stopped to wonder what that actually means?

Once the main cabin doors are closed, they need to have the emergency slides made ready to fire in case the doors are opened in an emergency. Cross checking means that they go across the plane to make sure the flight attendant on the other side did theirs correctly.

It’s that time of year when new TV shows start up again. Tyla and I have been cutting down the number of shows that we watch, but there are still a few that we enjoy (marked in bold below.) I’m going to give the new Muppets show a try too since I liked the old one so much. The others I’ve included because I know some of you watch them.

9/14 – Dancing With The Stars (ABC)
9/21 – The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
9/22 – The Muppets (ABC)
9/23 – The Middle (ABC)
9/23 – Modern Family (ABC)
9/23 – Survivor (CBS)
9/25 – The Amazing Race (CBS)

If you want the full list, check out Metacritic.

By default, Cortana is disabled in Windows 10 but I recommend that you enable it. If you have a microphone, you can talk to your computer and ask questions, set reminders, search the internet, start apps, etc (and of course you can type to Cortana too.) It will be extra handy once all those reminders and alarms sync with the phone, but for now they just sync across your Windows 10 devices.

It’s really easy to turn it on. Either click the Search icon in your taskbar or press the Start button and type Cortana. Then click the little gear icon on the left side of the menu. The top toggle button asks if you want to turn Cortana on. Yes! After you turn it on the first time, it will walk you through some quick setup steps.

Now that you’re all set up, check out some of the cool things you can do with Cortana. This is one of those features that will keep getting better over time, but it’s already pretty useful. I love having Cortana on my phone, especially for the time and location-based reminders.

We all find things that we like or dislike (usually the latter) when we’re using applications or websites. The good news, is that more and more apps (especially from Microsoft) are coming with easy ways to give feedback. It’s generally in the upper right hand corner and it often looks like a Smiley Face. You might also find a button or a menu option called something like “Give Feedback”. Wherever you find it, I encourage you to use it. As an employee on a team that makes a product with easy user feedback options, I can tell you that one report from a user carries a LOT more weight than me giving feedback to my own team. We love to hear from you and it’s one of the most important signals we have for improving our products. (And if you throw in a positive note every once in a while, that’s appreciated too!)