ryanjsalva

Best advice I can give:

1. Create things. It doesn't matter if you're coding for yourself, a client, a charitable organization or anything in-between. You perfect your craft through practice. For example, when I first learning to code (at the time, web development), I taught myself by recreating other websites I admired. I tried to replicate everything from design to functionality. It meant hours-and-hours of practice, but I essentially "learned" from my heroes without ever meeting them in-person.

2. Focus on impact over deliverables. The efficiency, cleanliness and poetry of your code will get you in the door, but to become a stellar developer, you need to focus on creating an impact with your work. For every project, ask yourself "why is this important?" and then shape your daily tasks around that goal. Here's an example I gave one of my team members last week. When writing your resume, you could tell one of two stories. Obviously, you want the "good" one :-)

GOOD:Improved Mobile Center new user retention by 26% through the use of tutorials, sample code and ready-to-use demo apps for iOS and Android.

BAD: Working in a small team, built iOS and Android demo apps

As for job experience, I started life with degrees in 20th Century Critical Theory and Philosophy of Aesthetics with a minor in Music Theory. In other words, I was about as far away from code as you can get. But I found a job with an early e-commerce application service provider (ASP, today you'd call it SaaS) that was willing to let me learn on the job, then worked for other online retailers for 4 years before starting my own company. I eventually built my own business up to a size where we were able to acquire my first employer (that was a big day for me). After working as an entrepreneur for 8 years, I felt like I'd learned all the "easy" lessons on my own. I wanted to work in an environment where I could learn from coaches and mentors who'd already found success in their careers. Microsoft hired me to look after their JavaScript developer tooling as a Product/Program Manager. It's a terrific gig. I highly recommend it ;-)

Absolutely. It's on our roadmap. Right now, we're focused on raising quality and closing feature gaps for our existing platforms (Swift, Obj-C, Java, Xamarin and React Native). As an Apache Cordova committer, I'm personally excited to bring support for web technologies at-large. For example, I know a lot of Cordova devs are starting to look pretty seriously at PWAs. Although we haven't committed to supporting anything beyond "installed" mobile applications yet, it's a direction I'd like to explore. Honest question: which would you want first, Cordova or PWA support?

Personally, my team has been working on http://microsoft.github.io/code-push/ for the past two years. It's been open source (and free) since the very beginning. I'm also a committer on the Apache Cordova project which is practically an OG in the open-source community.

Microsoft at-large has a crazy amount of open-source. I've actually seen a lot positive change over the last three years as the company released a huge amount of IP under open source licenses. Just to name a few of my favorites:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript https://github.com/Microsoft/reactxp

Thomas says that since I'm American, my choices are white or yellow, so I'm going with yellow.

As Thomas said, yes, we are actively working on bundle signing. The current specification calls for an implementation where you the developer embed a public key in your app for distribution, while signing bundles with a matching private key that does not leave secure storage your machine. In this way, the bundles that you distribute via the CodePush service will be validated prior to being installed on your customer's phones.

Independent of code signing, all of our services are already secured with TLS and packages can only be uploaded by an authenticated account holder. In the future we hope to provide signing key revocation and read-only account activity logging.