Windows 8 team members talk about their experience

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version now out in the open, Microsoft's latest entry in its official Windows 8 blog site takes a step back from its usual format of explaining new features in its latest operating system. Today it has posted up interviews with two Windows 8 team members, Chris Edmonds and Mohammad Almalkawi, who have been on the team for about two and a half years each.

Edmonds was placed on the Windows Runtime Experience team where he worked on a number of projects such as registering Metro apps with WinRT along with helping to implement the application model for Metro apps. When asked what a normal day working on the Windows 8 team was like, Edmonds replied:

Normal day? One of the things that I really like about working in Windows is that there is rarely a normal day. Depending on the period of the product cycle, I may spend my day writing specifications, writing code, hashing out ideas with people on my team, fixing bugs, or one of many other activities. Even though the activities are varied, my day almost always involves problem solving in some form. Whether it is figuring out the cause of a crash or helping to design features, I get to work with smart people to solve interesting problems each day.

Almalkawi is a software design engineer on the Windows 8 team and helped to develop application extensions along with being the lead in development of the namespace enumeration API. When asked what the biggest surprise he had encountered since working on the Windows 8 team, he said:

The thing that surprised me the most at Microsoft is that you get thrown at real-world problems and you will be given the opportunity to own critical pieces from the very beginning. You learn on the job as opposed to training, which is also available if you need it.

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview now available to the public, Almalkawi says he is now working to improve the performance of the OS. He states:

We built things from the start to be high performance, so now we are fine-tuning that performance, given the tons of code that has been written to the infrastructure.