Hey guys,
A friendly reader made an interesting comment about how I sound somewhat secretive when I sign-off on my posts. That was really never my intention, I was actually just trying to sound casual. So, in light of that, I thought I would share a little about myself.
A little history about myself …
I was born in the Moscow, ID, USA, but I was raised mostly in a small, Canadian city named Windsor. I attended the University of Western Ontario, where I studied Computer Science.
I started my professional career in a small company in Toronto called KL Group working in technical support. KL Group was one of the first companies to produce commercial user interface components for Motif. I’m sure I’m dating myself, but Motif is a toolkit for X-Windows, a graphical user interface package used in my UNIX distributions. KL Group eventually introduced components for the then-new Java JDK; this was an area that I worked in as well.
I learned a tremendous amount working for KL Group. Technical support is not the most glamorous position, but boy do you ever learn a lot! Since KL Group built user interface components, the customers I supported were mostly developers who were integrating these components into their applications. Looking back, I think the reason I learned so much from this job is that I was forced to solve problems that I had absolutely on influence in designing. IMHO, when you’re writing code yourself, you can influence the sorts of problems you have to solve because you get to choose (to some degree) - the programming language, the execution environment, the platform, etc. In some cases, as a developer, if you hit a really tough problem, you can find a way around it.
But, in technical support, I didn’t have that option - I had to work with whatever environment, design, etc the customer already had in place. Not to mention there is always a severe time crunch because usually calling technical support is the last resort our customers took.
Anyways, KL Group was a great learning experience for me. After finishing my CS degree, I joined Microsoft.
At the time, Windows and Microsoft software was actually quite unfamiliar for me. My university and KL Group were both primarily UNIX and Java. It’s funny to say this now, but at the time I didn’t even own a PC 
my only experience with a PC and Windows was from using a PC X windows server at KL Group.
My first job with Microsoft was in their Developer Tools Division - I really love developer tools and would spend most of my 8-year career here. I worked initially in quality assurance for Visual Studio. Quality assurance is another position that is not very glamorous, but is a great learning experience. When you’re charged with finding bugs in software, you get a really good idea of how software should be built.
I eventually left my beloved Developer Division to work as a developer in Windows 2003 - I was part of the team that worked on UDDI. If I remember correctly, we had the distinction of being the first .NET feature in Windows 2003, as well as one of the first web service related products.
UDDI was great fun, but after a while I realized that Developer Tools was where my heart was. I returned as a program manager for the profiler feature in Visual Studio Team System. At Microsoft, feature teams are essentially made up of developers, testers and program managers. A lot has been said and written about program managers at Microsoft, so there isn’t much for me to add. This was an interesting position, but I’m not sure it was the best fit for me; but being a PM helped me get to my next position, which I think was the best fit for me.
My next and final stop at Microsoft was to be the product manager for Team Foundation Server - the server-side component to Visual Studio Team System. I really think this is where I did my best work at Microsoft. Being a product manager is a combination of many skills - coding, speaking, evangelizing, planning, etc. I spent about 2 years traveling the world telling people about this new product.
While I loved my job, after 2 years or so I decided it was time to move on. I’ve always had the dream of starting my own business, so in late 2006 I decided to do that.
I started a small consulting company named CounterPunch Software. My business was basically training, custom development and building product demonstrations. My legal company name is still CounterPunch Software, but in 2008 I decided to rename my company as WonderAffect. I thought this name better reflected the product demonstration related work that I was doing.
Building product demonstrations led me to Amazon Web Services. I loved using AWS for quickly spinning up computers to host demos on. Even when I was building Windows-based demonstrations, I often used SQS, SimpleDB and S3 for storage and communication.
I’ve made use of AWS since 2006 or so and decided to concentrate on it as part of my business. Recently, I started this web site to blog about subjects in AWS that are of interest to me. I also do training, development and consultation for Amazon Web Services.
If you want to see what I’m up to, check out: www.learnaws.com and www.wonderaffect.com I used to blog at blogs.counterpunchsoftware.com, but I haven’t posted there in quite some time.
Finally, here is what I look like (granted it is a glammed-up profile shot :)):
Well that’s all I can think of to share right now; if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.
Thanks!
Eric Lee.
