Today’s guest, Darinee Louvau, is twice retired from Microsoft and one of the few people who admit to an admiration of testing in production. Darinee is an amazingly gifted person. From hosting LAN parties in her Tween and Teen years to designing and building gaming crates for those parties, she is not afraid of getting her hands dirty. A self-proclaimed fan of lowering the cost of iterations, she moved up quickly through the ranks to become program manager for Microsoft on projects such as Answers, Bing, and even the streaming service, Mixer. She is a hands-on thinker, doer, and creator. We can guarantee you will never find anyone else with her can-do attitude.

Darinee shares how she personally prepares for inevitable mistakes in one of her hobbies by sewing with thrifted sheets to reduce costs. Using thrifted materials empowers her to make mistakes and continue to iterate. By using cheap materials to power each testing iteration she can lower the overall cost of iteration to get straight to the thing that matters, testing a solution against the actual live circumstance of what you really need to know.  (Psst! Darinee . . . your inner developer is showing. 😊)

Also in today’s show, we learn the answer to the age-old question of “What happens to the code when Microsoft kills it” as well as the secret behind how search engines return answers. The one thing you won’t find in today’s episode is a binary answer about success. Darinee explains that it doesn’t exist and if you think it does, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Sage advice for our listeners.

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to leave a review on your favorite platform as reviews help new listeners find us. And be sure you subscribe to receive new episodes in your inbox every week. You never know what you will hear when data gets raw!

Also in this episode:

Command and Conquer

Duke Nukem 3D

Quake

LAN party

Mixer – Microsoft streaming shuts down

Home School Valedictorian by Adelitas Way

Chris Rae Podcast Episode

Raspberry Pi

The Useless Box

Microsoft Bob - Killed by Microsoft

Halo Reach in Firefight mode

Toyota Century

Darinee on P3 Adaptive Blog - A 48 hour case study from Bing - Zero to Sixty :)

Lost wax method in 3d printing