Xbox Live History

Having worked in Xbox Live I often get questions about its past.

REST efficiency

Making simple REST API is easy but once you do more complex things you don't want to stick with the simple rules any more.

Clients and eventual consistency

If you're working with a distributed system it is likely that you use eventual consistency to make your system scalable and robust but what does this means to clients?

How to know when to auto scale

When it comes to auto scaling I tend to see one of two approaches. But neither is actually good.

Abstracting vs Isolating dependencies

Anybody who is practicing TDD or BDD knows that it is important to abstract dependencies. Especially external dependencies you have no control over. But that might not be enough always.

The last fire watch

Last week I promised another leadership story so this time it will be from the military.

More psychology of shipping

Last week I talked a little about things I saw the leadership team do during the Xbox One launch. But there are two more stories I wanted to tell.

Psychology of Shipping

During the last few months before Xbox One shipped I did some interesting observations.

Interviews for senior developers

Since I recently moved away from Microsoft and Washington to join Ericsson in California I recently did a number of interviews. And it was once again proof that most companies do not know how to interview in my opinion.

Protecting your resource identifiers

In a lot of older web applications as well as newer RESTful services I've seen it fairly common to have identifiers such as user and order IDs just being an auto incremented primary key from the database. This approach has the problem of revealing your total number of users/orders in a certain time period. Information your competitors could use against you!