William Blum is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft Research where he leads the engineering team behind Project Springfield. He is passionate about functional programming and has applied it to real-world engineering projects at Microsoft. Prior to joining the research division of Microsoft, he worked on Windows where he used F# in various projects including a large-scale static code analyzer, a root-cause analyzer for software regressions, and data analysis tools for software compatibility. Before joining Microsoft, he studied a D.Phil. on the Lambda Calculus and Game Semantics.
Project Springfield is a business incubation from Microsoft that brings best practices for security testing in a cloud service entirely built in F#. This talk tells the story behind adopting a functional programming language in a large company like Microsoft, and how it helped quickly prototype an MVP for a brand-new cloud service offering. I will share my personal experience with functional programming, how I got to live the dream of working as a functional programmer and eventually lead a team of F# developers at Microsoft.