Benjamin M. Watson
ben [at] benwatson [dot] org
Work Experience and History
Principal Engineer at Microsoft
Bing, 2008 – Present
- Recognized expert in .NET performance in Bing, Microsoft, and the industry.
- Designed and coded critical query-serving components for Bing. Extremely high-availability, reliability and performance requirements. Utilized advanced .NET programming techniques, pushing the envelope of the CLR’s capabilities.
- Mentored individuals and led teams to monitor and improve performance in the Bing platform.
Led development of large application at foremost satellite imaging company
Application Engineer, GeoEye, SeaStar Fisheries Information Service 2005 – 2008
- Developed large product (150,000 LOC) used by thousands in fishing industry (C++)
- Developed services for real-time data delivery, handling thousands of messages per day (C#, XML, HTTP, FTP); interfaces with 3rd party systems across Internet.
- Developed internal tools for automating processes, managing assets, and simplifying
analysis of oceanographic data - Improved reliability of software with unit testing; eliminated unintended down-time
- Additional technologies used: MFC, Simple MAPI, Win32 API, IIS, SQL Server 2000,
Exchange Server 2003, NUnit, Nant, ASP.Net - Led team in all software development activities
Published Books
Writing High-Performance .NET Code, July 2014.
Education
MS Computer Science
May 2006
George Washington University Washington, Washington, DC
- Area of focus: Software engineering, user interfaces
- GPA: 4.0
BS Computer Science
August 2004
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
Other Interests, Skills, Activities, and Experience
- Interest in operating systems, mobile applications, and distributed systems
- Proficient in UML, relational databases, database design, and Linux
- Published articles on www.msdnaa.net (see below)
- LEGO® modelling, piano, music, crosswords, Italian language and culture, literature
- U.S. Citizen, experience in high security environments