Driver Development and Much More With Mike Calligaro

MegaTrain wrote:

Cool interview.

I agree with you, Rory, I never thought much about a driver's role in having to interpret complex or messy or inconsistent hardware signals and convert them into a consistent API for talking with the rest of the system.

Sounds pretty tough.

That interview left me walking away with a lot of thoughts.

I had always thought of device driver work as just being the job of writing software that made it possible to access hardware. It sounded straightforward, you know? In my mind, hardware, because of its physical nature, and because of all the logic involved, should be perfect (provided there are no issues with the materials themselves).

That thought seems pretty naive now I don't know why I ever would have thought that (aside from the whole Boolean logic thing).

I actually like the reality better, though. It sounds like much more fun. A bit tedious, yeah, but the difficulties sound like a fun challenge.

The example of a button firing seven times after having only been pressed once really pleased me. It also started to shed light on why some device drivers are so frikkin' huge. I imagine code that's nothing but a thousand if...then sequences

Ultimately, what I loved so much about the portion of this interview that covered driver development, was that Mike explained it so clearly. It reminded me of the clarity with which Charles Petzold explained circuits and logic in the book "Code".

All so cool...

XavierS wrote:



That was a great interview! I really enjoyed the casual style. Maybe it's just because I've been studying calc III for 12 hours , but it was extremely satisfying to watch.

I've watched nearly every channel 9 video and have been here since the site started but have never felt the need to leave a comment before now. I just wanted to encourage you to do more videos like this. It had a great mix of interesting personal stories, geek culture, and education, especially since we don't get to hear much from the CE side of the company.

The first point on the channel 9 doctrine talks about how it is all about the conversation and it is not a marketing tool. Many of the videos on here I feel lean too heavily towards marketing, pure product demonstrations for example, which I can understand and obviously they have their audience on here that want that material which is fine. But this video I felt really exemplified what channel 9 is all about at its core. It put a human face on a part of Microsoft I never knew much about and frankly would never really have any reason to trust if I ever needed to at some point. And it started a conversation which has me thinking about practicing my state diagrams for my comp. arch. exam tomorrow, make that today!

If you do get a chance to talk to Mike again, or if he reads this comment, it would interesting to hear about the different positions people fill in the CE group. I imagine it would be very different from the roles people play in the software side of things, but I don’t know. And as a CS major leaning more and more to the hardware side of things I think it would interesting to find out what kinds of jobs people do there.

Sorry for the long reply,
Adam

Don't be sorry for the long reply - it was one of the nicest things anybody's said so far about any of the stuff I've done an C9 - makes it all seem very worthwhile

Anyway, glad you liked it. Mike was a great guy to interview.

And we will be chatting with him again. There's a lot more to the guy - a lot of stuff we didn't cover in this interview.

He has some very interesting thoughts, hobbies, and so on. I don't think he spends much time with his brain in neutral. Seems like the sort who's always thinking about something...

Charles wrote:



Well said, Adam. Rory has brought the human-ness back to Channel 9.

Sometimes it's easy to forget the human component of technology and engineering, which is really the most important part. After all, humans make software, people create technology and think up innovation. Even here on the Death Star.

Thank you, Rory. Great to have you here.

C

Word, yo. It's great to be here. Seriously.

This job rocks.

papavb wrote:

um Rory did you shake his hand at the end there? He should put up a plaque saying he did so .

Real good interview btw, much props.

Sometimes people catch me by surprise.

The handshake in this video was one such example If you watch, you can see that I laugh the tiniest bit when shaking his hand (at least that's how I remember it).

It wasn't until mid-shake that I realized I was shaking someone's hand.

All ended well, though, as there's free Purell all over campus. My germaphobia was satisfied with a nice chemical coat of the stuff.

Massif wrote:

Interesting video.

Perhaps could have done with a slightly wider zoom though, it looked a little cramped! Just having space around you two would have made it looked a little less confined.

Agreed.

Our cameras have the capability to do 16:9, but we don't use it.

I'm hoping that we change that, though - and as soon as possible. I could really use some 16:9.