ABOUT

My name is Deb Haldar . Currently I'm working as a Senior Software Developer at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Over the last nine years , I’ve worked on a number of high profile products including Windows Desktop Search, 3 versions of SharePoint Server, Authentication platform for Office 365 Cloud Platform and more recently on Xbox Cloud services.

I immigrated to Canada as a teenager to pursue a degree in Electrical Engineering. At that point I had no idea about how to choose the right school that’ll give me the best boost for launching a career or how to get the first internship. I also had no idea about the implications of choosing different majors within Electrical Engineering (Distributed computing vs. Control Systems) would be on my future career. Needless to say , I learnt all these the hard way, making my share of mistakes. And all through those years , I just wished I knew someone reasonably successful in the industry whom I can ask questions related to my career or academics. I didn’t need or want someone very high up, just someone who was a few steps/years ahead of me and can provide me some guidance.

Nevertheless, through a combination of luck, smarts and hard work, I scored an internship with Microsoft in my third year of University. The internship resulted in a full time offer and I ended up moving to US in 2006. Soon thereafter I started  having questions on career advancement, project management, personal finance , immigration and visas etc. Starting an adult life and career is hard , but it’s even harder if you’re trying to do it in a different country on a work visa. This time around, finding answers to some of them,for instance career advancement were a little easier because I had access to some very good mentors within my workgroup. However, some topics were pretty hard to get answers on (for example – should I use a Roth 401k or After tax 401k) because most of the people I knew were not familiar with personal finance topics. So in these situations I had to find these answers through my own research and sometime learning from mistakes.

The reason I started this blog was to share the things I learnt in my journey as a software developer. I’ve divided my learning in 3 categories – technical skills, career and personal finance, because I believe these are three necessary dimensions for creating a successful life. Of course there is a 4th dimension and perhaps the most important one – family and relationships – but that is a topic too complicated to handle here J

So ,whether you’re a student looking for guidance, a practicing engineer having a few unanswered question or an immigrant tech worker looking for information , I hope you find something useful in here. If you have a question unrelated to the posts, please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected] – I’ll try my best to help or at least point you in the right direction.