Raymond Chen

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 1992, Chen has worked on OS/2, Windows 95, DirectX, and later versions of Windows. Outside of Microsoft, he is known for his articles on Windows programming. He is a popular speaker at Microsoft PDCs and other conferences. He is also known for his dry humor and his custom of wearing suits at work.
Writings
Articles
Chen's blog, primarily aimed at software developers, focuses on the history of Windows programming and his own experience in ensuring its backwards compatibility. He is noted for his Psychic Debugging articles, as well as two useful types of thought experiments in software design: "Imagine if this were possible" and "What if two programs did this?".
Chen also authors the Windows Confidential column for Microsoft's TechNet magazine, which explores similar subject matter.
Books
In 2005 he contributed an essay [http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/24/45779.aspx "Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behavior?"], adapted from his blog to Joel Spolsky's book The Best Software Writing I.
Chen's first book, titled The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows was published by Addison-Wesley in January 2007. The book is primarily a collection of essays on technical topics, some previously published as blog posts.
Hobbies
His computer-unrelated hobbies, as described in his blog, include cooking, classical music, bicycling, and learning foreign languages (Swedish, German, and Mandarin Chinese). Chen created many early episode summaries of The Simpsons for the alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup. As he stated in his Microspotting interview, he is a "former knitter".
Before his career at Microsoft and lasting even into 1995, Raymond Chen identified himself as "just another Linux hacker" in his Usenet sig. He is listed in the Linux kernel CREDITS file as "Author of Configure script".
His favorite text editor seems to be vi.
Quotations
One of the questions I get is, "My app is slow to start up. What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to start up faster?" The answer is, "The super evil trick is to do less stuff." -- "Five Things Every Win32 Programmer Needs to Know" (16 Sept. 2005)

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