My real name is Harry Pierson, but I've gone by "DevHawk" online since I started my now-neglected blog back in 2003.
In August 2023, I joined DBOS, a startup radically rethinking operation systems, databases and distributed systems. It's the latest startup from industry luminary and Turing award winner Michael Stonebraker. In October 2023, DBOS released our first "friends and family" preview. For more background on DBOS, check out this article from Forbes and/or this introductory video
I'm probably best known for my involvement in the Microsoft development community. I was with with Microsoft from October 1998 until June of 2019 - over 20 years! In that time, I had a wide variety of different jobs. I started in Microsoft Consulting before moving into a technical evangelism role. I spent a short time as an architect for Microsoft's internal IT department. When I finally joined the product groups, I started as the program manager for IronPython before spending most of the second half of my MSFT career as part of the Windows team. I spent the Windows 8 and 8.1 product cycles as a program manager on the team that built Windows Runtime. After four years as a PM, I got tired of writing specs so I switched to a developer role. I spent most of 2014 with the Midori research project working on C# for Systems. In 2015, I rejoined joined the core Windows team, working on the cross-platform plumbing that powers SmartGlass which eventually evolved into Project Rome. After that, I helped form the xlang team, with the goal of bringing Windows Runtime's language projection technology cross platform.
In June 2019, I traded in my blue badge to join the new Seattle office of NEO Global Development. In my time as the NGD Enterprise Chief Software Architect, I spearheaded the development of Neo Express, the Neo Smart Contract Debugger for Visual Studio Code, Neo-Test and Neo Visual DevTracker.
I always say that the only way to build great products is to talk to the people who use it. So feel free to contact me - Discord, Twitter, Mastodon and good old email are usually the best ways.