Drew and James open the show with a plug for a cool job, a short discussion on a recent company acquisition, and some reflection on an extraordinary event that they went to on Friday. This week’s guest is Kenneth Auchenberg, a program manager at Microsoft.
We have a very timely guest this week. If you haven’t heard, Microsoft recently opened up their new downtown Vancouver office. We’re happy to have Auchenberg on the show this week to talk about dev tools, Microsoft, open source, and all the fun things that are coming up in the web world.
If you are wondering what a program manager is, Auchenberg breaks it down for us. His role at Microsoft is to support the evangelists, as well as help Microsoft build products and move in the right direction with them. He is a big web performance and tooling junkie. He is also a big open source supporter.
We cover a lot of ground with Auchenberg. From specific things like the new features in the Edge dev tools, all the way to some of the new things they are doing within the development community. We discuss the Visual Studio Code editor and why it is so great as well as some of the progress on normalizing developer tools across different browsers, operating systems, and devices.
Auchenberg also started the dev tools meetup. He has partnered with some people from Mozilla to make sure more browsers are represented.
One of the big takeaways from the talk is the new direction of Microsoft. It is evident to see that Microsoft is putting a lot of energy into building new tools for all platforms. They are helping the community, releasing open source projects, and contributing back to the community.
Microsoft is also hiring, so be sure to check out their website for all the positions available.
The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.
Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
