Microsoft veteran Rico Mariani is leaving the company after having spent almost 3 decades at the company. The engineer, who has worked upon a slew of cutting edge projects including Edge, Internet Explorer, Sidewalk, and the Visual Studio, announced the news through his blog Performance Tidbits. As the name implies, the blog deals with performance issues surrounding the Microsoft platform and the ways the same can be improved.
Speaking on the topic, Mariani said:
My last day at Microsoft will be tomorrow, 3/24/2017. I’m not sure I will actually lose access to this blog because of the way authorization happens but I think it would be a bad idea for me to keep using it because of it’s strong affiliation with MS. Best wishes to all and thanks for reading all these years.
Mariani joined Microsoft in 1988. This was just a couple of years after the company had gone public. However, it had yet to launch the office suite of tools. This was also before the current CEO Satya Nadella joined the company. At the time, Mariani was working upon a compiler for an internal programming language called C# (different from the C# that we know and love).
Mariani was also one of the hands on guys and despite being one of the senior most members on the Microsoft team, he could be found working on anything from visual studio to the .Net framework. At the launch of the Microsoft Edge browser, he had described himself as the perf guy.
As the perf guy, it’s my job to tell you every day how bad everything is, that’s pretty much the gig. But today, just this one time, I’m gonna tell you the rest of what I’m thinking — it’s pretty smokin’ [sic] guys. You should be proud of what you accomplished — I know.
