Adam Barr beat me to a post that I wanted to write after the Microsoft company meeting on Thursday - Dave Cutler winning the Bill Gates award. Adam has a nice summary of what the award is and a couple of typical DaveC anecdotes.

What he doesn't describe is the atmosphere in the stadium when Bill Gates announced Cutler's name - you had thousands of employees give DaveC a standing ovation (and laugh at the joke DaveC cracked in his acceptance speech which I see Adam wisely left out :-) ). I remember telling someone sitting next to me "There goes any chance I had of ever winning this thing". When you start of an award series by handing one to Cutler, you're setting a standard which is almost impossible to live upto.

After the event, I sent him a heartfelt 'thank you' mail. I'm not sure whether he read it (I haven't gotten a reply yet) but I wanted to convey the gratitude that all of us felt - no accolade or award is too much for this man. Studying Cutler's life and his work in the past year or so have lead me to my current fascination for how to do good, sound 'engineering' (as opposed to just writing code and hacking together code).

I've talked to a lot of people who have worked with Cutler in the past. Almost everyone I spoke usually had two things to say

• He was the greatest programmer/engineer/project leader they've ever seen.
• He was the angriest and scariest person they've ever worked for

The latter is where all the fun anecdotes come from. Here are a couple of anecdotes I've heard from people who had worked with Cutler in the past. All these probably happened over a decade ago.

• If you made a bad checkin, Cutler would take the offending piece of code and send a mail to Jim Allchin (who was the VP for Windows and a bunch of other stuff) with the additional line "Do you know that this person works for you?". The fun part was that you as the developer never got CCed so you were never really sure what was getting sent to Jim Allchin about you :-). Of course, no one ever got fired  as a result of this but it always kept people on their toes. :-)
• DaveC and members of his team were having a meeting in a conference room when a senior VP walked in with some bigshot she ¹ was meeting. There had obviously been some conference boom booking snafu. Clearly impatient, she snapped "I believe I had booked this room? Can you people please leave?"
  Big mistake.
  Cutler slowly stood up and said "I'm Dave Cutler. Who the f*** are you?". The VP quickly closed the door and beat a retreat without saying a word. Later, someone on Cutler's team looked up the conference booking information and found that the VP was right - she *had* booked the room and Cutler's team had mistakenly come to the wrong room. :-)

Seriously though, Cutler is probably the greatest programmer to work at Microsoft (a senior friend of mine called him a "contender for the programmer of the century of the century award"). If you're at Microsoft, I would strongly recommend reading through Cutler's code (you can do this if you are a student and have access to the Windows Research Kernel). I learnt a lot about how to write beautiful C code by looking at his scheduler implementation in the NT kernel. Above the level of coding style, it is pretty evident that he was able to make design choices back in the late 1980s that have let the NT kernel scale and adapt itself in a wide variety of ways.

Designing and writing large parts of an operating system that is used by almost a billion people - that's a pretty tough act to follow.

Notes

1. I think the person who told me this anecdote said it was a 'she' but I could be mistaken.

# Monday, September 10, 2007 1:58 AM