My real name is Harry Pierson, but I've gone by "DevHawk" online since I started this blog back in 2003. My blog originally ran on an engine of my own design, then DasBlog, then WordPress, then back to a custom blog engine called Hawk. Now it's in yet another custom blog engine called SkyHawk that generates a static site from data stored in my BlueSky PDS.
I've been working at DBOS since 2023. DBOS is a startup radically rethinking operation systems, databases and distributed systems. It's the latest startup from industry luminary and Turing award winner Michael Stonebraker (the original creator of PostgreSQL). Our primary products are DBOS Transact an open source durable execution library for Typescript, Python, Go and Java as well as DBOS Conductor, the control plane for your durable workflows. It's a startup, so everyone does a little of everything but my primary focus is the Java version of DBOS Transact.
Before DBOS, I was best known for my involvement in the Microsoft development community. I was with with Microsoft from October 1998 until June of 2019 - over 20 years! In that time, I had a wide variety of different jobs. I started in Microsoft Consulting before moving into a technical evangelism role. I spent a short time as an architect for Microsoft's internal IT department. When I finally joined the product groups, I started as the program manager for IronPython before spending most of the second half of my MSFT career as part of the Windows team. I spent the Windows 8 and 8.1 product cycles as a program manager on the team that built Windows Runtime. After four years as a PM, I got tired of writing specs so I switched to a developer role. I spent most of 2014 with the Midori research project working on C# for Systems. In 2015, I rejoined joined the core Windows team, working on the cross-platform plumbing that powers SmartGlass which eventually evolved into Project Rome. After that, I helped form the xlang team, with the goal of bringing Windows Runtime's language projection technology cross platform.
In June 2019, I traded in my blue badge to join the new Seattle office of NEO Global Development. In my time as the NGD Enterprise Chief Software Architect, I spearheaded the development of Neo Express, the Neo Smart Contract Debugger, Neo-Test and Neo Visual DevTracker.
I always say that the only way to build great products is to talk to the people who use it. So feel free to contact me - BlueSky, Discord, LinkedIn and good old email are usually the best ways to reach me.