Matthew Kotsenas

Improving human rights in the digital world - safety, trust, and privacy. Building the next generation of fast, secure, and scalable web services to detect and stop online attacks.

With the Engineering System up and running, I took on the new challenge of becoming a software engineer. In addition to sharpening my software development skills, the new role gave me a wider breadth of experience in the software development lifecycle. As a member of the ES team, I contributed to the daily development experience of Microsoft Edge, and strived to make our developers' lives a little bit better every day. My specific responsibilities included: - scaling the build and test orchestration systems to reduce cloud spend, onboard new test targets, and reduce latency for our developers - facilitating the continuous merge of the Edge codebase with the Chromium project - improving the languages, frameworks, and tools we use every day to help ourselves write higher quality code faster

Concurrently with Microsoft Edge's transition to a Chromium-based architecture, I again took the opportunity to improve the tools and processes that Microsoft uses to develop software, this time as a Program Manager on the newly formed Engineering Systems (ES) team. As a member of the ES team, I am responsible for the daily development experience of Microsoft Edge, and that our developers can make our users' lives a little bit better every day. In order to do that every day, our ES team must: - ensure that the team can quickly and easily stay up-to-date with the churn of the Chromium project - streamline the build-test-debug cycle so that developers can write high-quality code faster - optimize the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to ensure that developers can get feedback and iterate every single day

In August of 2016, I returned to the Microsoft Edge team as a Program Manager for the DOM team (Document Object Model). The DOM team is responsible for maintaining the core HTML representation and programming model and how that interacts with technologies like JavaScript and CSS. During this time period I helped the team with an ongoing refactoring of the core DOM tree structures. My contribution to the project was three-fold: First, I was responsible for project and release management duties for the team to ensure that our code was always ship-ready and that we were constantly validating our changes with real customers. Second, I was responsible ensuring that the work we did was apparent to the user and improved the experience of browsing the web. Instrumental in that work was engaging with the web dev community on the Speedometer benchmark, what it provided, and how it could be made more representative of real user behavior. Lastly, as Microsoft's reliance on web technologies grew, I was a resource for other teams at Microsoft to understand and improve the performance and interoperability of their sites and apps.

As Microsoft rebooted Internet Explorer to later become Microsoft Edge, I took the opportunity to reboot many of the project and release management policies and tools used at Microsoft. Our team built an early data processing pipeline that several teams adopted to uncover insights from the improved data and telemetry capabilities of Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. At the same time, our team created automation to improve work tracking, release planning, and compliance assessments of the software used by Microsoft's customers.

For Internet Explorer 11, I joined the Composition and Rendering team. Our team had two related goals for IE 11: to drastically improve performance on the graphics and CSS-heavy sites of the day, and to lay the groundwork for the next generation of graphics performance on the web, namely preserve-3d. During this time we tackled one of the biggest web programming challenges: decoupling JavaScript's single-threaded DOM programming model from the browser's (and thus user's) interaction thread. This decoupling was named "independent rendering" and helped usher out the era of JavaScript benchmarks and usher in the era of user-centric performance analysis.

I was on the performance team for Internet Explorer for versions 9 and 10. As a Program Manager on the performance team, I was responsible for ensuring that our customers experienced a consistently fast browsing experience, and that web developers had the tools they needed to build smooth and fast sites and apps. In order to accomplish that goal, my peers and I performed daily triage and regression analysis to catch and fix performance problems before they impacted customers, built tools and visualizations to help developers understand the performance impact of their changes, and helped define the set of scenarios and measurement techniques used to monitor browser performance.