#2782

Hiring, Hiring, Hiring, Better Hiring

Ade Miller — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:34:00 +0000

I’m also thinking about hiring for a third reason. I’ve submitted a talk to Seattle Code Camp. With all this hiring I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good interview, interviewer and interviewee. Not to mention how the whole process might be improved from the ground up.

Technical Interviews, the Good, the Bad and the Awesome

For most people a bad hiring decision is the biggest mistake they can make and a great hire can take you and your team to a whole new level. So why do so many teams approach hiring in an ad-hoc manner? This talk is some thoughts on how to improve both as an interviewer and as an interviewee in a technical interview.

What does it take to hire great developers? How to be a great interviewer and run an interview loop. What makes a good coding question and what doesn’t. Hint “write merge sort” doesn’t cut it.

As a candidate how can I navigate technical interviews and coding questions in particular? What are interviewers looking for? How do I show that I have the skills they are looking for?

Is today’s technical interview process the best we can do? How can we build the best experience for both the interviewee and interviewer? Some final thoughts on working within your companies existing framework and were we might go from there.

Ade Miller has been getting hired and hiring for the past couple of decades. Currently he interviews two or three people each week.

Who is the “Will Code for Food!” guy. That’s Mark. Mark’s chutzpah got him a job at the bottom of the .com bubble. He ended up interviewing me for some positions Greythorn when I too got laid off in the tail end of the bubble’s collapse.

Hiring, Hiring Hiring, We’re Hiring

Ade Miller — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:50:31 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about hiring recently, having just been through the whole interviewing process as part of my move to Microsoft Studios. Now I’m thinking about hiring again because… my team is hiring!

I’m the development manager for one of the studios here within Microsoft Studios. We have several positions open. These are not only for developers with game experience but also great generalist developers who aren’t afraid about working with some fantastic cutting edge technologies. I’m not kidding here. I’ve been in the software business for nearly two decades now and this is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever worked on.

There are more but here are just a few of the positions we’re hiring for right now. There’ll be more coming later. Above all I’m looking for smart people who can solve tough problems and get things done. It goes without saying that the team works in a pretty agile way. Trust me, it’s a great project.

Software Engineering: Development

Lead Game Engineer

Gameplay Programmer-IEB-Microsoft Studios

We’re the people that developed Kinect and profoundly changed the way people interact with technology. Now our incubation team is ready to change the world again, but we need your help!

We’re a small and growing team of experienced incubators and game developers working with truly inspiring entertainment technology. We brainstorm exciting and ground-breaking experiences and quickly build working prototypes on top of developing tech. We transform our ideas into reality through shipping first-to-market products.

You’re a developer with a stellar track record and you love to learn and tackle new challenges. You’re excited to collaborate directly with artists and designers in a game development-savvy studio to build and iterate on prototypes to achieve our creative vision. You’re looking to make significant contributions to the early stages of a project with huge growth potential.

If you think this sort of thing is for you then you can apply through the links above.

C++ AMP (Rough Cuts Version) Available

Ade Miller — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:55:49 +0000

O’Reilly have released the book Kate Gregory and I are writing under their Rough Cuts imprint. This means you can read some of the first chapters right now and get a copy of the completed book (paper or electronic) when it’s published.

We’d love your feedback. This is your chance to get the inside scoop from the authors and (indirectly) the developers on the product team as they put the finishing touches to C++ AMP and we finish the book.

I’m looking for other ways to get content out to people and get feedback. Watch this space!

I’m Writing Another Book. This time on C++ AMP

Ade Miller — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:13:26 +0000

So I’m excited to announce that I’m writing another book. This time it’s on data parallel programming with C++ AMP. Kate Gregory and I are writing a book on C++ AMP. I’ve been spending a lot of time writing some of the case study applications and samples as well as writing some of the chapters. Below is the Cartoonizer case study application that shows frame-by-frame image processing using GPUs.

For those of you who have followed this blog for a while you’ll know I’ve been a big fan of the power of GPUs for several years. I’ve very excited about C++ AMP and the rich programming model it provides for leveraging the power of data parallel accelerators like GPUs.

Here’s the book abstract. You can find more details on the O’Reilly site.

C++ AMP
Accelerated Massive Parallelism with Microsoft Visual C++

Capitalize on the faster GPU processors in today’s computers with the C++ AMP code library—and bring massive parallelism to your project. With this practical book, experienced C++ developers will learn parallel programming fundamentals with C++ AMP through detailed examples, code snippets, and case studies. Learn the advantages of parallelism and get best practices for harnessing this library in your applications.

Discover how to:

Gain greater code performance using graphics processing units (GPUs)

Choose accelerators that enable you to write code for GPUs

Program code using the Microsoft® DirectX® platform

Apply thread tiles, tile barriers, and tile static memory

Debug C++ AMP code with Microsoft Visual Studio®

Use profiling tools to track the performance of your code

Needless to say I’ll be looking for reviewers of some of the material we’re putting together. If you have an interest in parallel programming with GPUs and want to learn more about programming with C++ AMP then watch this space.

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Post tags: C++, C++AMP, GPGPU, Parallel book

Geek Vacation Day #2: Going Native 2012

Ade Miller — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:08:25 +0000

Another great morning at Going Native 2012. Herb Sutter’s keynote on future plans for C++ was really interesting. But so far what’s really impressed me is the CLang compiler’s error and warning handling. I think this would really help the usability of C++. Often half the battle is understanding the small novel returned by incorrect use of a template. He also had some great examples of common gotchas and how CLang gives really useful error information.

In other news…

I’m also helping out with some samples for a book on C++AMP. As soon as they’re ready – really soon I hope – we’ll be making them available for feedback along with some of the book content. As always feedback is the name of the game.

This conference has been great for helping my brush up on my modern C++. Like explaining exactly why

auto v = make_shared(1);

Is much better than:

shared_ptr v = shared_ptr(new Foo(1));

It’s not just because one looks nicer. Looks like I need to go play with my code again.

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Post tags: C++AMP, Events, GPGPU, Parallel book

Geek Vacation Day #1: Going Native 2012

Ade Miller — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:17:27 +0000

I’m m taking another busman’s holiday and attending Going Native 2012. Like my GPU Technology Conference trip a few years ago this is a geek vacation rather than work for Microsoft. Although bizaarly it’s taking place at the Microsoft Conference Center on campus, it feels a little weird to pay money to go spend the day at work. Turns out that was the lowest friction approach to attending.

So far it’s been well worth while. Today’s keynote was by Bjarne Stroustrup who focused on C++11 style. Really it’s this new style of programming with the Standard Library (in conjunction with lambdas), the RAII pattern (for example smart pointers) and a host of other features that reawakened my interest in C++. I can have much of the elegance of C# with the performance of C++.

In other news today’s WSJ has a front page article on the agile practice of daily standups.

WSJ.com – No More Angling for the Best Seat; More Meetings Are Stand-Up Jobs

I was actually interviewed by Rachel Silverman for this article but I’m not quoted in it. Nice to see one of my favorite agile (with a small ‘a’) practices getting some coverage somewhere like the WSJ.

Hopefully this post signals my return to the World of blogging and by implication having fun playing with and delivering software, rather than not having fun not delivering anything. 2012 is a brand new year. It will be better.

Because Everyone Should Have a Hobby

Ade Miller — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:37:00 +0000

Even if it’s just drinking. In my case that means single malt. Now, I never used to like whisky. This is no longer the case thanks to Nicky. She and I lived with for several years above a doctor’s surgery. And Tom, the aforementioned doctor, whose patients gave him bottles of whisky he didn’t particularly like every Christmas. The solution was remarkably simple. In return for living above the surgery we provided a free single malt disposal service.

This also led to Miller’s Second Law*; Whisky to didn’t pay for tastes better than Whisky you bought. This doesn’t mean that a free bottle of cheap whisky will taste great but it will taste that little bit nicer. Similarly a gratis bottle of Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban’s port finish will definitely taste that little bit fruitier than the same bottle you dropped $65 on.

Some of you might also ask what the hell is a bottle of bourbon doing in there. Well, it’s the spoils of cat sitting for my neighbors last week and I’ve been promising myself that I’d try a few good bottles of American Whiskey just to see what all the fuss is about.

I recently bought 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die. This seems like a laudable goal in the light of recent events. Plus it’s a lot less effort than some ridiculous bucket list of things I should have done when I was twenty five. All it requires is around $10,000 and a comfy couch to sit in while drinking. The biggest barrier is probably US liquor laws which don’t exactly make things easy.

The Quinta Ruban makes the 101 and deservedly so. I’m already plotting a trip to London and a couple of specialist stores in order to get started on the list.

* I know. This leads to the question what’s the first law? Miller’s First Law; The people you least want to see naked are the ones most likely to take their clothes off. I have a lot of empirical data from numerous European beach vacations to back this up.

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Post tags: High Performance Computing, Whisky

HPC Pack SP3 Ships and an Update on LINQ to HPC

Ade Miller — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:07:31 +0000

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you’d expect. I mean really, really not the way you expect.

Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure HPC Scheduler and HPC Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack 3 that includes updates to the HPC Pack 2008 R2 and a new Windows Azure HPC Scheduler to allow you to run HPC workloads on Azure! HPC is now a major Azure workload and the HPC team is working hard to enable that for end users and ISV developers.

There’s also an update on the next steps for LINQ to HPC.

As part of this release we’ve also updated the preview version of LINQ to HPC, however, this will be the final preview and we do not plan to move forward with a production release. In line with our announcement in October at the PASS conference we will focus our effort on bringing Apache Hadoop to both Windows Server and Windows Azure. Hadoop has emerged as a great platform for analyzing unstructured data or large volumes of data at low cost, which aligns well with Microsoft’s vision for its Information Platform. It also has a vibrant community of users and developers eager to innovate on this platform. Microsoft is keen to not only contribute to this vibrant community, but also help its adoption in the Enterprise. We expect a preview version on Windows Azure available by end of the calendar year.

You can read the full announcement and more about Microsoft’s Big Data strategy and their work with Hadoop at http://microsoft.com/bigdata.

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Read the rest of HPC Pack SP3 Ships and an Update on LINQ to HPC (199 words)

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Post tags: Events, High Performance Computing

What’s up Buttercup?

Ade Miller — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:08:35 +0000

There’s not been a lot of blogging going on of late… We’re in the final stages of shipping LINQ to HPC (an RC is now available). I’ve been writing samples and documentation, basically dumping what’s in my head into something that the rest of the world can read. Writing is writing, it’s all good.

I also got to write all the samples, which I thought turned out rather well, although you can’t please everyone. I got to write some additional “extras” libraries to make LINQ to HPC even easier to use.

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Read the rest of What’s up Buttercup? (198 words)

Speaking at BUILD: Analyzing “big data” with LINQ to HPC

Ade Miller — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:41:22 +0000

For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet I’ll be speaking at BUILD on Friday afternoon. (2pm session SAC-453T in room 210b).

Analyzing “big data” with LINQ to HPC

"Big data" refers to unstructured data sets so large that they cannot be analyzed using traditional database tools. Today, big data are becoming more common; it is prevalent not just in Web traffic, but also in industries like oil & gas, finance and manufacturing.

Based on Microsoft Research’s Dryad project, LINQ to HPC is a programming model and distributed runtime for building analysis solutions for big data. It goes beyond MapReduce and leverages the LINQ programming model and HPC scheduler to execute optimized query graphs across a cluster of machines.

In this session, you will learn how to use LINQ to HPC on both Windows Azure and an on-premise Windows cluster to build analytic apps that deal with big data. These apps will be able to scale out to hundreds of machines without having to deal with scheduling, data replication and node failure complexities generally associated with programming a large, distributed data-parallel system.

You can find out more about the session on the BUILD web site, this includes the video and slide decks etc.

For those of you who want the code then the Beta 2 release of LINQ to HPC can be downloaded from the HPC Connect site. This includes most of the sample code I show in the talk (with the exception of the back testing example).

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Post tags: Events, High Performance Computing, Linq, Microsoft, Parallel Computing