jeffwilcox
Seattle, WA, USA • 19 years at Microsoft • University of Michigan graduate • Cities, cycling, & coffee
I manage Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Open source is an essential part of Microsoft culture: our teams depend on and contribute to open source, and we work in the open across thousands of repos on GitHub.
You can find me on BlueSky, GitHub, LinkedIn, and X. You can professionally email me at jwilcox at microsoft and personally at jeffwilcox at jeffwilcox (both .com).
Blog
My $6,000 Tesla Wall Connector: the story of bringing Electric Vehicle charging to a high-rise condo tower in Seattle
November 25, 2019
Scaling from 2,000 to 25,000 engineers on GitHub at Microsoft
June 25, 2019
My home network: Ubiquiti UniFi gear, fiber gigabit Internet, CAT6 and CAT3 wiring
April 10, 2018
From 20 to 2,000 engineers on GitHub: Azure, GitHub and our Open Source Portal
November 18, 2015
Adobe's Creative Cloud - I've been spending $2/day
June 18, 2013
Work: GitHub at scale
I work on what I love: building great developer tools and experiences for developers, by developers. The self-service GitHub tools I built at Microsoft have scaled the number of engineers working in the open on GitHub from 2,000 to over 70,000.
In past software engineering and engineering manager roles at Microsoft I've worked on making our Azure cloud work great on all operating systems and with many great open source languages. I also have worked on server software, client and phone platforms, and plenty of ambitious failed products.
Fun: Built a popular mobile app
I built the now-discontinued app 4th & Mayor, which reached the #1 top-rated social app on the Windows Phone Store regularly from 2011-2014. The app launched in 2011 and had over 100,000 daily active users and a 300k+ installed base at its peak.
The app was a third-party Foursquare app, and the name was inspired from city living, maps, and intersections. The backend was written in Node.js & ran on AWS before migrating to Azure.
Work: Cross-platform cloud
As a software architect on the Microsoft Azure team, I got to define our early open source strategy, leading a team of engineers to deliver cross-platform Azure command line tools as well as the family of Azure SDK REST libraries for languages including Node.js, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and .NET.
Work: Early open source at Microsoft
Early in my career I brought my Mac to campus to work on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, Silverlight Toolkit, and later the Windows Phone Toolkit. Designed to be a great code-available out-of-box update for devs, each toolkit generation brought improvements to Microsoft's adoption of reference source, working in the open, and paved the path to today's approach whereby most Microsoft open source is offered under OSI-approved licenses.