Tyler Walker

I started my vacation last week with some awesome news: I got a promotion! In September I'll officially be a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. In the interest of my fading long-term memory, I want to document how I think I got to this moment. Namely, I want to share

I'm a firm believer that all mentor/mentee relationships should be bidirectional. As good as it makes me feel to help someone along in the early parts of their career, I learn a lot about technology & leadership by forming connections with people I'd otherwise probably never meet.

In the last few months my organization has made move towards describing our problem space using Domain Driven Design. We build enterprise software that powers Microsoft's global computer networking services. In this space we use a hybrid of vendor appliances and homegrown software solution to provide a better service to

As I was wandering around the grocery store chatting with my friend Micah the other day, she started explaining this really interesting concept about "water batteries"; and how they could help the adoption of solar technology. One of the biggest problems with solar reliance is the fact that it's hard

My main interest in this paradigm isn't necessarily around pandemic working conditions, but what a hybrid working model is going to look like for the folks who continue remote work as some of their peers return to the office.

As I make my way through An Elegant Puzzle I'm going to be documenting some of my thoughts and reactions. Today's is around what Will Larson calls "The Four States of a Team".   In the book, he prescribes system fixes to each of these states (even when things are going

Given that I just spent the last hour or so reflecting on my last year of goals, I want to keep these fairly brief. I've noticed a pattern in my writing is that I write a lot for the first few paragraphs and then it drops off. This year, I

I did this same kind of retrospective last year as a retrospective following the previous year's New Year's resolutions. Obviously, when I set my resolutions in December of 2019 I had no idea what was in store for me. Despite the pandemic, and as a result of my status as

One of the most important skills I've learned over the past few years is how to deal with conflict at work. If you're working with a lot of bright and passionate people there are bound to be profound disagreements; especially around group decision making. I don't believe that managers always

The Problem Secrets are things like API keys, user credentials, and certificates that will implicitly allow someone access to another platform or service. My team has a local.settings.json file in our repository that contains some secrets that allow us to call dependent services. In order to successfully run

I've had a few false starts contributing to OSS by finding a new-to-me project, skimming through their issues and trying to find an easy PR to write.

Basically ever since I started my journey to become a software engineer, I've wanted to become an engineering manager. It's literally the first thing I say in all of my interviews. As I progress in my career as a developer, I want to do more reading and writing about management.

Since the start of working from home, I'm spending a lot of time on Teams calls helping coworkers debug their code. One of the hardest parts about that is watching people pull up cmd.exe to run their projects. While you can make improvements and customizations to cmd.exe to

System.Text.JsonIf you've ever worked with JSON objects in C#, you've probably heard of the NewtonSoft.Json library. While it's still one of the most popular libraries for serializing and deserializing JavaScript objects, Microsoft's new System.Text.Json library brings native support from the language and several performance improvements

What is GraphQL? GraphQL was created by Facebook as a way for clients to fetch the data they need at runtime. The website describes it with 3 simple bullets: Describe your dataAsk for what you wantGet predictable resultsWith GraphQL you write a schema that describes all of your data (names,

The last time I took consecutive days off was at the end of January when my friend and I went to New York. Even then, we left on a Thursday and we were back to work on Monday. The last time I took a full week off was last October

A friend recently asked me about my decision to move from SAP Concur to Microsoft. Admittedly, my time at SAP Concur was pretty short; I worked there for a little more than 1 year. It does feel silly writing a post about switching jobs after having only done it once.

I'm writing this post to reflect on the things that got me through the last few months, not to prescribe a one size fits all approach to dealing with the state of the world.

When you're first learning to code, you'll write a lot of code really quickly. Whether it's a personal blog, school assignment, or a side project; you've got total control over the whole project and you just go. One of the first things I learned in industry is how slow professional

One of the things I learned from reading Atomic Habits was the importance of 1% improvements. It can be very hard to find the single actions that will make you 20% or 30% better at your job, but if you can find small areas to make 1% improvements everyday, you'll

With all of my free time thanks to COVID-19, I've been doing a lot of walking and listening to audiobooks. Without my daily commute, I've declared podcast bankruptcy and mostly pivoted to listening to audiobooks on my walk with Rainier. I just recently finished What You Do Is Who You

At Microsoft, my team is responsible for building the tools that help manage and maintain the company's enterprise network. Our team has about 10 developers and almost as many active products. The Problem Historically, this team did not have many UI engineers. Most applications weren't even created by members of