Leading 650 engineers with Microsoft’s Brendan Burns

**Brendan Burns** (0:00)
My org's about 650 people these days. Today's calendar is 14 one-on-ones in this podcast.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
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**Dan Lines** (0:38)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Brendan Burns, Microsoft corporate vice president and co-founder of Kubernetes.
Brendan, thanks so much for joining us.

**Brendan Burns** (0:52)
Absolutely, great to be here.

**Dan Lines** (0:53)
Pumped to have you here. I've heard you say that your first coding was inBASIC on a Commodore 64 What was your pathway to becoming a developer? How did that happen?

**Brendan Burns** (1:07)
The Commodore 64, I mean, the Commodore 64, I don't think was the first computer that I used, but it's definitely the first computer I programmed. I think I'd use a friend's Apple too. I didn't own, my family didn't have computers. And at that point.

**Dan Lines** (1:18)
You had to go to the lab, your friend's house.

**Brendan Burns** (1:20)
Yeah, I had to go to a friend's house. And like one friend had the Nintendo and one friend had the Apple too. So this is like 1983 But the Commodore was actually a bake sale computer. So my third grade had a bake sale.
And like what they did at the end of the bake sale was they used the money and they bought a Commodore. And they put it in the back of the class. And I think they just didn't know. But back in those days, both the Apple too and the Commodore, they just booted into basic. Like you could just like at the command line, just type in instructions and go at it that way and poke. And is that a part of what the commands are for lighting at pixels?
Poke was one of them. They just push the value into their rate and let it. And there was Byte Magazine too. That was one of them. And otherwise they had programs and just like follow along at home or whatever. I don't mean, I really thought of it as a career or anything like that. I didn't know anybody. I think the funny thing to think about it is, I don't know anybody who's a software developer. My dad was a lawyer and like people were teachers that worked at Boeing. And I don't think I'm a single software engineer until I got to high school.

**Dan Lines** (2:19)
Yeah, that was gonna be my next question. Did you have a group of buddies that were coding together? How did you take a leap there? No mentors or anything like that?

**Brendan Burns** (2:27)
I had a babysitter who was into computers and she had some books, but she was like early childhood ed person who did daycare and then like stood, was a nanny in the summer. And it's like our nanny in the summer, friends of my parents, actually. That's actually a nanny, but she just happened to be into, she's like an incredible collection of sci-fi novels. And I think my virtue of that was, knew about computers and had some stuff on that. I mean, it's kind of, it's a very different time.

**Dan Lines** (2:52)
Yeah, yeah. Best nanny ever.

**Brendan Burns** (2:54)
And I mean, when I got into middle school, there was a computer lab and I hung out in the computer lab a lot, mostly to play video games. Again, at Dark Castle, which is still like the world's greatest video game. There was a Mac lab, they had this old Macs. But then we learned how to like, there was this program on Mac called ResEdit, which is like this resource editor, which let you go in and change all the strings in the programs and change images and icons and stuff like that. And so we started like hacking around that way. We weren't really coding that we were hacking around. And then there was a little crew of us, little like middle school doors. And I did try and learn how to program back then. I wasn't super successful at it.
Partially I think because it was all from books and like the internet really wasn't a thing and you couldn't like just grab tutorials. And like I had to ask my parents, like Christmas one year, my really, my only present, a C++ pilot.