Year and a half ago I accepted an offer from Xbox security team.

It is very important to reflect on your career at least every year and this post is not exception. That said, in the past 18 months I was fortunate to help ship Xbox One gaming console, my experience is detailed in this top answer on Quora.

Xbox One Controller

Overall, it was a great experience. Coming from mobile OS world it was both exciting and challenging time in which I learned to:

  • design & ship security services for millions of customers
  • build advanced security solutions
  • deploy and monitor Xbox Live services
  • investigate issues in production and deliver quick fixes
  • get used to being on call 24/7 for a week at a time (we use Pager Duty)

It is hard to imagine that I would move back to client development with long development cycles and at least a year before customers will see your work. Services is incredibly fast-moving part of the company and is like a drug: once you’re hooked you keep coming for more.

Another interesting aspect of my past 18 month was to observe well-oiled team of high-caliber developers delivering security solutions at a rapid pace. The amount of learning and productivity is multiplied and you have a feeling that anything can be solved. Now, It is indeed a very hard task to hire a great team and keep reports challenged and happy, but I will cover that in the future posts.

But it all just the beginning as we every day there are new challenges, new interesting things to work on so the learning continues.