Ep.7 Dustin Campbell: on transitioning from PM to Dev mid-career, building .NET developer tools and escaping from a software sweatshop in Las Vegas

This week, I'm talking with Dustin Campbell, a Principal Software Development Engineer who's been working on tooling at Microsoft for nearly 15 years. He's worked in Visual Basic.NET, the Roslyn C# compiler, the C# extension for Visual Studio Code, and the WinForms designer in the latest release of .NET Core. He has an undergraduate degree in jazz performance guitar, which naturally led him to building spam tools for his father, then to a software sweatshop in Las Vegas before finally landing at Microsoft.

Along the way, I learned what distinguishes compiler engineers from other species of software engineers, whether there is any hope for paring down the concept count to empower non-professional software developers, and why immutable synax trees are awesome.

Links from the show

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