I joined the Word team as an engineering manager in August 2014. My team is responsible for shipping
monthly updates of Word on Mac (and until April 2017, iOS).
OneNote is a beautiful note-taking app and part of the
Office suite. OneNote helps you keep track of things in life and runs on desktops, laptops, tablets, phones
and browsers. It keeps your notes in sync across all devices.
In July 2013, my team shipped an overhauled version of OneNote for iPad and for iPhone,
The team created a full-blown OneNote version for iOS with a completely redesigned user interface. For more details, check out
The Next Web,
The Verge
and Engadget. This update
helped our iOS apps improve their App Store ratings from 3 to 4 stars. The team continues to ship updates regularly.
In March 2014, for the first time ever, my team shipped
OneNote on the Mac. We
celebrated this release by creating our own version of "One Day More" from Les Miserables (see below).
Rearchitected the iOS and Mac apps to be asynchronous and multithreaded using
Grand Central Dispatch, making the app 74% more responsive.
Implemented the user interface for sections and pages on iOS and the various sync indicators on both iOs and Mac.
Improved the OneNote sync engine to better support mobile devices.
Implemented section encryption (this feature is publicly known as "password protected sections") on iOS, Mac.
In July 2014, I participated in the first Microsoft hackathon. I initiated a project called OneLaTeX which
aimed to make OneNote understand LaTeX. I was joined by 2 other
engineers and we had a demo ready in less than 2 days. The project won 3rd place in an internal group ranking.
I was the first engineer to work on a Windows feature called
Windows To Go. Windows To Go is an enterprise feature that allows booting and running the Windows OS from USB drives.
As part of my work on Windows To Go, I designed and implemented a variety of components throughout the Windows stack, from UI in C++, through
Win32 DLLs, to boot sector code in assembly. My code runs on hundreds of millions of machines worldwide.
My colleagues and I invented a method to dynamically redirect boot to another operating
system (US patent 8966236 B2), so that booting into a Windows USB drive is user friendly, without fiddling with BIOS settings.
CSEtella is a Gnutella-like P2P network.
More details can be found
here.
Implemented a P2P node with a web frontend for monitoring the node and a crawler for discovering the topology of the P2P network. The node uses the following open source projects:
Discovery of the network's topology using breadth first search.
Web Frontend
Interesting stats about the node.
Web Frontend II
List of nodes which replied or forwarded a message via the monitored node.
Mayorita
Mayorita was a free web service that let users tap into the
knowledge and opinions of others by asking any yes/no question and getting
an aggregated answer within seconds!
Firesay is a browser plugin for Firefox and Chrome that offers an enhanced web browsing experience with voice
commands. It was developed in 2009, long before the age of Siri and Cortana. With Firesay, you can use your voice to search the web, watch TV shows, share on social networks, control tabs,
scroll through pages and more. Firesay is great for people who want to browse
the web more efficiently or for people who cannot use their hands to interact with the browser
(i.e. cooks, people with disabilities etc.).
The plugin was written in C++, using STL and Poco (a
C++ template library). Speech recognition was done using
Microsoft's Speech API
and the browser plugin itself was implemented with FireBreath - a cross
platform framework for creating browser plugins (using either NPAPI or ActiveX).
CMake was used to build both Firefox and Chrome plugins.
Check out the videos below for a demo of both plugins.
Firesay was also featured on CNET.
This project is no longer under active development.
