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Comment by systemswizard | Hacker News Reader

Would be cool if Microsoft would focus on engineering instead of blog posts

The Old New Thing is very much engineering. Any contemporary engineers who don't think they have anything to learn from the experience of the past as recounted in the blog are doomed to repeat the same missteps.

And much as one would hope that Raymond Chen's blogging is holding up any important Microsoft initiatives, I very much doubt that it's much of a distraction for a megacorporation.

RE "....Any contemporary engineers who don't think they have anything to learn from the experience of the past....." 100% correct

Also, you should be able to still search for Raymond Chen's blog process posts, but part of why he has nearly a blog post every work day for quite so many years is that he built up a huge queue, adds to the queue only during relatively free time, and has automated the posting of that queue. It's also seems to relate to why so many are multi-part deep dives. (This post also ends with a tease for the next post.) It was often probably only one root investigative journey related to a Windows support question investigation or user story writeup or documentation was needed to be written or some other TIL rabbit hole was found, but breaking it into multiple parts keeps each part easy to read individually and also keeps the queue full for weeks where things are much busier.

Raymond Chen’s blog posts are one of the best things coming out of Microsoft.

As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.

Personally, I prefer cool blog posts over "add another Copilot button that does nothing to something that did not require it anyway" or "paper over a perfectly fine API with a newer version that has 60% of the functionality and 120% of the bugs" (which is what Microsoft engineering mostly seems to boil down to these days), but you be you...

He's been blogging continuously for close to twenty years - he was one of the original wave of Microsoft bloggers (along with Larry Osterman, Michael Kaplan, and several others I can't remember).

It is very much an engineer's engineering blog, and written by someone deeply in the trenches.

They don't have an engineering problem, they have a management problem which ruins and obstructs anything good their engineers might try to make.

They have been blogging about engineering before blogging was mainstream. You have to subscribe to their CD of MSDN articles to appreciate how info they put out for their products because they used to be developer centric.

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