Well, I’m leaving Microsoft after nearly 6 years. I’ll take a short bit of time off before my next job. I’m going to be joining the fine folks at Honeycomb to help contribute towards building an even better developer experience (and perhaps a bunch of other stuff too).
Yes, I made this picture in powerpoint. Since I’ve been heavily involved in the F# and .NET community for several years, I wanted to write a little bit about why, and about my deep commitment and belief in the open source technologies and communities I am involved in, even as my workplace role changes.
Since I’m a language and developer tools geek (I do this stuff for a living!), I like to think about where developer tools and languages will be in the future. This post is one of those kinds of future-thinking posts.
The current developer tooling landscape can improve a lot Before I dive into a bunch of stuff that I’m excited about for the future, I’d like to acknowledge that modern developer tooling as most people know it has a lot of room for improvement:
This post applies mostly towards larger companies than smaller ones. The kinds of companies with big, top-down management cultures.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced me, like so many other office workers, into a remote work situation. The messaging was that this was temporary:
Prepare for 3 or so weeks at home No office equipment budget, since we’ll all be back Try to keep cool and calm, this will be over soon But as those few weeks went by, it became clear that this was going to be more of a forced year of remote work, not just a few weeks.
The F# language is kind of wierd (in a good way). Born out of Microsoft Research and initially sold to the world by Microsoft as a part of Visual Studio, it now has a vibrant open source community and ecosystem around it. This puts it in a funny place. A great way to illustrate that is to visit the following links:
F# homepage on the Microsoft .NET site Homepage for F# and the F# Software Foundation The first link a page on the Microsoft marketing site for .
I love using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) as my main editor whenever I can, and because I’m an F# developer, I get to use the amazing Ionide plugin .
But to get specific, the main thing I use F# and VSCode for is F# scripting. F# scripts are the best tool for doing ad-hoc computing work, such as:
Trying out a library Writing a utility to process some stuff, like transforming markdown files Testing out someone’s code when they’re asking for help in the F# Slack , F# Forums , or pretty much anywhere Etc.