My Recap for 2021

Feng Gao
2 min readJan 9, 2022

1. Career

It is the 3rd year that I worked in Microsoft. As a Microsoft 365 infra team, we’re serving multiple M365 product lines, like Exchange, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc.

The main challenges in the work includes

  • Based on Suzhou, we have to sync with headquarter (US west coast) almost daily. Due to the different time zone, you have to wake up early.
  • Heavy workload during the on-call rotation. Since Microsoft has been transiting to cloud service provider instead of selling software lienees. It requires 24 * 7 support across the global.
  • Legacy technology stack. Tech debt is well-known issue in Microsoft internally. Engineer system needs to improve in many perspective.

What I gained in the last past year.

  • Engineer capability: Thanks for the dot-line manager, he is open for anyone (including joiner engineer) to sell ideas to improve our service. What’s more, there are a lot of colleagues who are special in specific domain. You can learn a lot from them.
  • Leadership: There are a couple new-grad engineers since last summer. I am also the leader of a feature crew at Suzhou. From that moment, I don’t only focus on getting works done, but also learn how to organize the work and make decision.

2. Books

  • ASP.NET Core 3 框架揭秘 Though Microsoft official documentation is best stuff if you want to learn ASP.NET Core , this book takes deep dive to the source code level. The most attractive part is about Microsoft.Extensios.* packages. They are backbone of ASP.NET Core and contributes to understanding it.
  • Mastering Window PowerShell Scripting PowerShell is wide used in the Microsoft. It is the first-class citizen as script language. This book is great if you want to step further in this language.

3. Open Sources

This is my contributions in 2021 on GitHub.

  • Ugit: This is git implementation in C# language. It implements the basic operation of git, like add , commit , push , fetch etc.
  • Backend-Interview: This is a interview question collection for a back-end engineer. It’s also the most Startred repo. (Looks like most people cares about how to get a job)
  • DotNetWeekly: This is the open-source magazine that focuses on the .NET ecosystem. For well-known history, .NET is not quite popular in China like JAVA or Go language. This magazine will try its best to make .NET grate again.

Also, I raised the my FIRST PR for Popular open source project.

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Feng Gao

A software developer in Microsoft at Suzhou. Most articles spoken language is Chinese. I will try with English when I’m ready