001: Steve Lacey - Random Thoughts

This week we are joined by Steve Lacey - software engineer extraordinaire. Steve is a pommie (that's an English person), a father to two wonderful kids and he's worked on some pretty amazing projects.

Graduating from the Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine in London, he came away with a Masters of Engineering in Software Engineering and has worked on projects like XBox games, Direct X 5, flight simulators and more.

A co-founder of SwitchGear, Steve has also spent considerable time at Microsoft and is currently employed at Google in their Kirkland office.

BV: Steve, firstly a big thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for my readers. I'm very grateful you have taken the time out of your busy schedule to chat.

No problems - I feel honoured that someone from Down Under has the least bit of interest in what a pomme is up to in the USA :-) Oh, and by the way, I'm definitely not speaking for any current or former employers here :-)

BV: It seems like you have spent a large proportion of your life developing software or games and even some other interesting projects that we will get into a little later. Can you tell us a little about the type of kid you were and where the drive for this area of your particular passion came from?

I was the typical geek kid at school - generally ignored by all; especially by members of the fairer sex. I couldn't kick a football for toffee, so I generally just did well at the academic stuff. My parents were pretty encouraging and I guess I got into it all through a friend whose dad bought him all the computer toys. We're talking KIM-1, PET, Apple IIe, etc... Then my dad bought me a ZX81 and a Spectrum and I was hooked. I learnt Z80 assembly 'cos BASIC was boring, and then helped out a computer science teacher of mine with a book of computer games he was writing. This was at the time when you could buy magazines and books with printed listings of games in them that you'd type in.

He'd written a sort of graphical adventure game for the Spectrum, but the display code was just incredibly slow. I rewrote it in self-modifying assembly code and sped it up by a few thousand percent. He was horrified - not that it was faster than his code, but that I'd done the unspeakable act of writing self-modifying code. Nonetheless, the book was printed that way.

Anyhow, I just ended up loving the low-level - eek out all the performance possible code, which led to working at a games company whilst at college, then eventually joining Microsoft to work on games technology.

BV: Please be patient with me as I'm not that technical. In your five things meme you mentioned that in the early nineties you wrote an application for the official scorers at TCCB cricket matches that replaced the traditional, centuries-old scorebooks. You even got to sit in the scorers box at the 1993 Ashes series. Can I ask, were you gutted when the Aussies kicked your arse? : )

No comment. We was robbed. But at least I had the best seat in the house!

BV: Seriously though… to me, that's a pretty big achievement in itself. Was it a real buzz to get, as you put it, '70 year old cricket geezers' to use a system like this that you had developed? What did they say?

They loved it! It really surprised me. I was expecting them all to go on strike and refuse to use the machines. These were 386 Dell laptops running BSDi UNIX and X-windows. So far away from Microsoft Windows... anyhow, they took to it like a duck to water.

BV: You have worked on some pretty damn cool projects in your time at Microsoft, what stood out for you as your most important work and what made you so passionate about it?

Two projects really - DirectX and Flight Simulator. DirectX really changed the game (pun intended) with gaming on the PC. Windows as a gaming platform was a joke before DirectX game along and we turned it into the premiere platform - I'm really proud of that. Plus the technical challenges were out of this world and a lot of fun (and late nights) to solve.

I spent the last nine years of my career at Microsoft (with some side diversions into other gaming things) working on Flight Simulator - I worked mostly on the graphics engine and completely rewrote its underlying architecture for the latest version. If I do say so myself, it's a beautiful thing to behold. I also love the fact that it's a universal game - people from eight to eighty (and beyond) play it and explore the world flying aircraft as diverse as the Piper Cub to the Boeing 747. And it's just so damn technically correct.

BV: In 2006, you moved to Google in their Kirkland office. Working at Google has obvious advantages, but what was it that drew you to this company?

After Switchgear, I was looking around and thinking about what to do next when I had lunch with a friend and ex-colleague of mine who I have the utmost respect for. He's a former long-time employee at Microsoft and now at Google Kirkland. He convinced me to check out Google and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Google is so developer-centric... it really is all about the code. In most other companies the developers are second class to other roles such as management, marketing, sales, etc. At Google, the individual developer is king. After all, that's where the product comes from, isn't it?

Oh, and the fact that the office is about three minutes from my house didn't hurt either...

BV: Google seems to be a pretty forward-thinking company, always thinking about it's users and the experience they have through their products and services. In your time at Google, what have you learned about the way software and the online medium (blogs, podcasts, search engines etc.) can change people’s lives?

Man, it didn't take working at Google to convince me of that! How about this: my best friend had been estranged from his mother and brother for quite a large number of years and they'd lost touch. She Google'd for his name, found my blog where I'd written up a post about his wedding and then she emailed me. I sent him some email saying something like - do you know this person? To which he replied "Man THAT'S MY MOTHER!!". I do believe capital letters and volumes of exclamation points were involved. Anyhow, they're now back in touch and a grandmother now knows a granddaughter she never knew she had.

BV: You're stranded on an island with a laptop and an endless battery supply. You can take one game, one piece of software and a book. What would they be?

Do I have a satellite uplink? I guess not. Game? Wil Wright's Spore - I'm hoping I don't get stranded before it's released. Software? A C++ compiler so I can write more software. A book? Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough For Love.

BV: I'm guessing you must have some amazing stories from your time at Microsoft and Google. If you ever make your way Down Under, I will be sure to shout you a pint and get a few of these stories out of you! For the time being, what's one of the funniest stories in your time at these companies?

So far it's probably regarding some of the outrageous developer events we threw for developers during the early DirectX times.

From hiring out the San Jose State University arena where we threw a toga party complete with playboy "stars" being auctioned off in a slave auction and live lions (that ended up getting loose); to closing down Microsoft's RedWest parking garage to host the launch party for DirectX 1 (which the VP running some division there claimed would cost them money and apparently we managed to convince Gates that closing down the campus for a few days would actually save MS some money - anecdotally of course...); to a Vampires and Witches party in the French Quarter of New Orleans at Siggraph in '97.

Man, you just can't do that kind of stuff anymore. At least you can't at Microsoft...

BV: OK, last question… out of all the blogs in your feed-reader, which are the ones that you just can't live without?

OK, I'm culling from a couple of hundred here! In no particular order:

Lifehacker http://www.lifehacker.com/
ParentHacks http://www.parenthacks.com/
BoingBoing http://www.boingboing.net/
TechCrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/
Scripting News http://www.scripting.com/
Joel On Software http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Coincidental Floss http://halbryan.spaces.live.com/
Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com/
Random Acts of Reality http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/
GapingVoid http://www.gapingvoid.com/
Old New Thing http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/default.aspx
The Post Money Value http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/
Feld Thoughts http://www.feld.com/blog/

BV: Steve, it’s been great chatting with you – I look forward to that pint whenever you eventually make it Down Under.

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