Joining the Dark Side | SDET to SDE

Posted by Matthew Osborn on February 23, 2011

Today I am excited to announce that I have joined the Dark Side and by Dark Side I mean the developer team here at Microsoft. Many of you know that for the past two and half years I have worked on the ASP.NET team as a Software Development Engineer in Test or SDET. It has been an awesome experience and I enjoyed every minute of it, however my true passion is writing production code and that is why I have decided to make the switch to a Software Development Engineer or SDE.

So what did I do while I was a SDET? I worked on several products that have been shipped. I started out on the team working on the ASP.NET WebForms mainly the ClientID feature in 4.0. Then I moved to the MVC 2 team where I was able to experience the entire lifecycle. Most recently I worked on both ASP.NET WebPages and NuGet. One of my favorite products I worked on while on the QA team was LTAF! For those of you that don’t know that is a in process test framework that the ASP.NET QA team created and uses. In my time on the QA team I also created a podcast called Coding QA. The focus of the show was to explain how we test software on the ASP.NET team and also to let me vent about my frustrations. Okay so what will I be working on now? In the near future I will be working on the vNext of the ASP.NET MVC framework as well as vNext of ASP.NET WebPages. I will also continue to contribute to NuGet with what little free time I will have left.

Overall, it really doesn’t seem like much has changed given that I am on the same team, working on the same products, setting in the same office, but I am looking forward to all the new and exciting opportunities that I will have as a SDE! Also, that means that there is even more openings on the QA team so if your interested check them out here. Trust me the ASP.NET QA team isn’t just a bunch of button clickers its a lot of fun, check out Coding QA if you don’t believe me.