Dave Plummer

I've been there like six weeks, and I'm working on this Ole presentation cache that I mentioned earlier.

And I'm on Windows 95, and I've got Excel inserted into Word, and I'm in the kernel debugger, and something's going wrong in the scheduler.

And I've been there, you know, I've barely written any x86 code, and I'm looking at the Windows scheduler trying to figure out why my thing is deadlocked.

And eventually I get stuck.

So I'm kind of out of my element.

And I send an email to the Windows 95 kernel team and say, could you send somebody by?

And so about 10 minutes later, this developer strolls in and they're just holding a null modem cable, which is to connect my two machines together so they can debug one with the other in case I didn't have it, but it was already set up.

And so they sit down and they're using WinDebug, which is just a horrible debugger.

It's just, it's accursed.

But they're very, very competent with it.

And they are just blasting through the call stacks and they're checking all these objects in the kernel and trying to find out who's waiting on what and why things are deadlocked and what things are signaling and what's not.

And it's just this quick silver ballet of call stacks flying by.

And I'm watching this and I'm pretty blown away because I'm a good programmer, but this person is an amazing debugger and I've never seen a performance like this.

and uh about five minutes in i just hear oh i see and then they disconnected and got up and left and that was laura butler who became a distinguished engineer at microsoft i think she may still be i'm not sure if she's retired or not but so she kind of set my template for you know what microsoft developers were like when they're debugging and what kernel developers were like and even what female developers were like because i had such a small sample set um

But it was a very high standard.

carpenter or... I love anything done really, really well.

Two billion.

Something like that.

I've seen the metrics and it's up there.

Crazy to you?