Rico Mariani is a performance guru at Microsoft and a wonderful person. After a number of years on the Visual C++ team since 1.0, he went to MSN and then to CLR land where he now beats the "measure! don’t ship bad performance! measure!" drum to much good effect. It’s a pleasure to work with him. Interestingly, Rico is one of the handful of people I polled for "what should I cover" in the new Machine Architecture talk I’m currently writing for the seminar Bjarne and I are doing next month. In the current draft of that talk, I have two slides titled "Mariani’s Methodology (or, Rico’s Rules)" — I’m sure he’ll be mortified at the capitals.
Rico has just been interviewed on Channel 9. Recommended viewing. It’s sprinkled throughout with everything from useful career advice (whether you’re just starting out or looking for a next project), to interesting insights into early Visual C++ and Web product development, to how to ship at high performance and high quality in any language. Rico’s blog is also a great resource — and don’t get hung up when he talks mostly about .NET managed code, because the principles generalize to performance in any language and on any system.
How do friends congratulate the man? The pictures tell the story. Good on you, Rico!
On a sad note: One of the five people previously interviewed on the Behind the Code series is Technical Fellow and Turing Award winner Jim Gray. Jim is still missing after disappearing in the Pacific on January 28. Widely known and loved, he is greatly missed. Our thoughts are with Jim’s family.
Sutter’s Mill 