Entries tagged 'cloud computing'
MicroChef creates culinary classics for a cause
By Thomas Kohnstamm, Chief Microspotter
Geek in question: Dean Iacovelli
Job title: Director of Collaboration Solutions for Microsoft State and Local Government
By day, Dean Iacovelli travels the country, working to transition New York City, the State of California and other state and local governments into the cloud.
By night, he is a master Italian chef and all-around DIY food and wine geek. Want to make your own mozzarella from scratch? Ask Dean. He’s done it. Homemade salami? Done that too.
Whether he is educating politicians on how the cloud can make city governments more efficient or encouraging friends to explore the great breadth of regional Italian food, Dean is the kind of person who can’t help but share his enthusiasm with others and show them what more is possible.
For the past six years, Dean has combined his passion for cooking and Microsoft to support a greater cause by donating a multi-course dinner for six people to the Microsoft Giving Campaign online auction. Dean works with the auction winner to create a unique menu featuring food and wine pairings from a specific region of Italy.
I recently sat down with Dean at Macrina Bakery in Seattle to discuss the cloud, cuisine and charity.
Where’d you develop such a deep interest in regional Italian food?
I grew up in Montreal and lived close to my Italian grandparents. My grandmother was from outside of Rome and was a master of her regional cuisine. She met my grandfather in Canada and he was from Puglia – so she also learned to make the food that he grew up with.After my grandmother passed away, I slowly realized that the magnificent food – with all of its culture and history – was not going to cook itself.
I am also diabetic. That means I can’t eat pasta or other carbohydrates and have therefore had to explore beyond Italian restaurants’ “greatest hits.”
How did you decide that you were going to become a dinner party black belt?
I was living in Ottawa and started reading recipes online. I thought I would give a dinner party a shot and invited six friends over for what was like a seven-course meal.It was pretty much a disaster. I had overlapping courses, huge gaps between other courses and my homemade focaccia was more than a little tough to chew.
But I learned from the experience and starting throwing dinner parties all the time. I soon discovered that research and planning is 80% of the battle.
Has your cooking influenced your work at Microsoft or vice versa?
In both things it is really important to refine your process. But they are very different too. I love the balance between using my brain all the time at work and then switching to something that I create with my hands in the kitchen.That said; I do get very serious while cooking. My wife avoids me when I have what she calls my “cook face” on.
Tell us how the meal for the giving campaign came to be.
At first, I was donating money each year. But, as my work responsibilities continued to grow, I had less and less time to create elaborate dinner parties. So, I decided that it would be a good way to raise money and to also push myself to evolve as a cook.A big dinner party can take two months of planning. This event gives me a reason to really challenge myself. In each dinner, I always aim for one big goal… something that I’ve never done before, whether it is curing my own meats, baking a proper rustic bread or infusing my own grappa.
So you work best under pressure?
I essentially work in sales, so I like to have that date on the calendar and then work my ass off to make my numbers or pancetta or whatever it is.But it’s not just about pressure. I also really like to understand what makes things tick and then share that with others. For example, I do wine pairings for each meal and then create a Word doc with the name, vintage, type of grapes, tasting notes and a picture of the label so people can find the wine again if they like.
Are other people at Microsoft surprised when they learn about your double-life as a super cook?
It’s funny, because I find out all the time that my colleagues have some amazing talent. It’s like, you’ll have known them for years and suddenly they sit down and start playing concert piano or singing an operetta.That’s just the kind of people we have around here.
The Microhood: Big data, cloud computing and a million gigs a day
By Zoe Goldring
Here at JobsBlog one of our goals is to pull back the cover on jobs at Microsoft and give you a no-holds-barred look into the lives of ‘Softies. We’re also always trying to get more first person accounts of different jobs and teams at Microsoft. It’s like getting to know all the people in our neighborhood; nay our Microhood! This week we are very lucky to have Ed Harris tell us about his job as the development manager on Bing Cosmos. What I like most about Ed’s story is that he wrote it himself. This isn’t my personal view of his job or team and gives you a really good overview of what it’s like to be part of this group. Not to mention there’s beer. Yeah, you can almost always get me reading if there’s beer involved.Cheers! Zoe
I’m Ed Harris, a development manager on the Bing team. I’ve been at Bing since 2004, and worked on a lot of different teams – on the front-end/consumer-facing bits, deep in the platform space, and now in our infrastructure team.
Our team’s mission is to provide the stable foundation for Bing and other online applications to run. Want to install an operating system and deploy a build on 50,000 machines with a couple of keystrokes? That’s us. Need a place to store a petabyte or two of business-critical data? That’s us too. Want to analyze every page of the web? We’ve got what you need.
Our team is called Cosmos. Cosmos is the cloud storage and computing environment that Microsoft’s online properties use for data storage, analytics, and “Big Data” computation. Every day, we load or generate petabytes of new data – that’s one million gigabytes per day! In the online business data is the most precious commodity of all – whether it’s our relevance experiments, our copies of the web, or a thousand other data sets that get curated - all of it is mission critical.
All of that is great, but the thing I enjoy most about being in the infrastructure team is the diversity of what we get to work on. To build an efficient storage engine, you need brilliant system programmers who can make the disks do amazing and unnatural things. On top of that, you have to layer data integrity – at the scale we operate we have random bits flip from zero to one or vice-versa on a regular basis. So besides being fast, the storage layer needs to constantly scrub itself. We also have folks who are world-class compression experts. To be cost effective we need to squeeze the most data possible onto the disks, but not spend too much CPU doing it. Up further in the stack is our execution and computation team. They are able to take a user query, optimize it, and schedule it to run on tens of thousands of PCs. You can write a three line query in our language (called SCOPE), that actually turns into a map/reduce job across twenty thousand servers.
With that diversity of problem solving comes an incredible group of people. Our problem-space is on the cutting edge of cloud computing, and has attracted a group of rock-star engineers. It’s an infectiously collaborative environment, and not a day goes by when I don’t have the opportunity to learn a new technique or algorithm.
Though we take our responsibilities very seriously as the custodians of Bing and Microsoft’s data assets - we also have a lot of fun! We take time for team events like hiking or flash-mob Frisbee as a way to get to know each other and celebrate our hard work. On a daily basis, it’s fairly common to see team members cutting loose after work – the floor reverberates on a regular basis from aggressive Kinect volleyball and dance central contests. Aside from these happenings, we also built our very own infrastructure keg fridge this year.It’s called the InfraKegerator and we now have three different kinds of beer and home-made root beer on tap. And because we are all geeks, we intend to fully integrate our InfraKegerator into our datacenter automation this fall. We want biometric access control so other teams don’t steal our beer, alerts to fire when the kegs run low, 24/7 temperature monitoring, and minable data on which microbrews are most popular. It’s just one of the ways that we tie together work and personal interests to create a truly amazing workplace.
Working in this kind of environment – with a great set of hard problems to solve, a world-class group of coworkers, and a team that knows how to cut loose – this is what I love most about being at Bing.
Bing's Cosmos team is hiring software development engineers! Click here to view a list of openings with this team and find your place at Microsoft.
