terrence cook

I oversee a number of projects for a large government agency in NY.

I can't talk about most of it, but if you read articles about how Bridgewater does financial research, I managed the teams that made sure that it worked and was stable and reliable in production.

I managed a team of developers responsible for one of the company’s future product offerings.

I was the first full time employee in QA for Windows Azure. As SDET I was responsible for performance testing, test strategy, test scheduling, release management and mentoring junior new hires. In 2010 I took over the test team and since then I staffed the team from 3 to 10, set the test standards, established the sign-off criteria, drove the test strategy for every release, and laid the foundation for the test infrastructure. I managed a team of up to 15 vendors in India to keep the cost of manual test execution low as well as better utilizing our test hardware. I managed in excess of a thousand servers just for my team and ensured they were working 24x7. The Fabric Controller is the operational brain of Windows Azure responsible for managing hardware, deploying software, monitoring client services and automatically correcting both software and hardware failures. I also led one of the test teams responsible for testing the browser on the Windows Phone 8.

I led a team of 4 developers for an ontology driven machine learning and file processing pipeline used in an exploratory project focused on extraction of structured data from unstructured sources. Where structure did exist, we also leveraged attributes for media, PDF files, web pages, and more to glean the users interests overall and current focus using this information to surface further subjects of interest. For example if the user was reading a PDF we could suggest other documents from many sources that were about the same subject, or had the same author. This component was later incorporated into SQL Server as the semantic index.

I was the first employee in QA at Zumobi, a mobile phone software startup spun out from Microsoft. I staffed a team of 6 engineers, was the top bug finder, owned the test strategy, built the device testing lab, staffed and owned the IT department, built out the test server farm and oversaw QA from desktop prototype stage to beta launch. Filed for patent on Ad Delivery for Mobile Devices.

Primarily I focused on reducing the live site outages that had become common as utilization of the service was outpacing the infrastructure. As a part of this effort, I did SQL performance profiling, code debugging, and test case evaluation. I also built performance models for the service allowing the team to easily predict how much hardware was needed for how much load and oversaw a transition from an over-crowded datacenter to all new hardware in another datacenter including specifying the hardware, testing the new build out, and preparing the cutover plan.

I oversaw testing of multimedia products delivered via CD-ROM as well as integrated animation and sound ActiveX controls that shipped with Internet Explorer 4. I also owned QA for the system responsible for processing, storing and reporting for all MSN websites. During my tenure I helped transition from a purely SQL approach to ETL pipeline processing. This system, while much evolved, is still in place today and while it was early days for big data, many of these lessons still apply. I also managed the team responsible for testing the search and compressed storage engine that shipped with Encarta and other CD-ROM titles. After I left this became the HTML help search and storage engine.

I was a contract lead in the Hardware Group. I managed a team of contract testers responsible for the first Natural Keyboard, the first ergonomic mouse, the Sidewinder 3d Pro joystick and the Gamepad that formed the basis of the XBox controller.

Designed and implemented entire systems for Parts and Service and Finance and Insurance in car, boat and RV dealerships including credit scoring, form printing, inventory management and profit reports.