CQ, Familia sweep Born & Bred Awards

Brief Profile:

Name: Chilumba Mubashi

Age: 29

Title: Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Company: Microsoft Corporation – Mobile and Embedded Devices Division

Industry: IT/computer-related /software development/software testing

Year started at Microsoft: 2003

Education: BA Physics; BS Electrical engineering; BS Computer Science.

Country of origin: Zambia

 

· I have helped to ship three versions of Windows Mobile that progressively included significant performance and scalability improvements.

· I have helped to ship Microsoft Exchange 2007 (E12) – part of the Dogfood pilot program.

· I led a team of Software Engineers to Test the improved Out-Of-Box-Experience for Email Account creation on a mobile device.

 

I would urge them to learn and become an expert in an area, aim for excellence, deliver what you promise, acknowledge when you are wrong, and develop great communication skills.

 

 

Well!! Chilumba grew up and attended his schooling in Lusaka, Zambia. He moved around a few schools.

Primary: Olympia Basic School, Jacaranda Basic School, Namunuga Primary School, International School of Lusaka (ISL).

Secondary: International school of Lusaka, all the way through the International Baccalaureate (IB). He is part of the 1st IB class of ISL after the school deprecated the 6th Form A-levels program.

 

In 1998, he moved to Asheville, North Carolina at Warren Wilson College (WWC) – where he obtained a Bachelors of Arts in Physics. In 2001, he pursued his engineering dream at an Ivy League university in St. Louis, Missouri - called Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) – he graduated with 2 engineering degrees; Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering and Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.

 

In 2003, prior to graduation, he was offered a position at Microsoft Corporation as a Software Test Engineer (STE).

Today, he is in a more technical role as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) in Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices Division. He works on the Outlook Mobile team, concentrating on Messaging applications for Smartphones and Pocket PCs (PDAs).

 

 

Yeah that’s right……………it was a sixty second biography program.

 

 

Many, but mostly Robert Russell and Bob Yannes, the two main engineers that created the Commodore 64 computer. It should have been Bill Gates, but I had not heard of him yet in my Commodore computing days.

 

 

Am Pragmatic. I am a person, but I am an engineer too. I choose practice over theory. My goal is to make things work, not to just dream things up. Along the way, I want to sustain friendships. I am also hungry for technology. If I am amazed by something, I will try and figure out how that was done, and learn how to do it if I can.

 

 

"First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently" by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman.

 

 

I loved computers when I was young. But what got me in was the ‘Commodore 64 Computer’. My parents bought me this machine as a video game system. But I started breaking the video programs and would usually end up in a ‘command prompt’. This is where you could enter your BASIC programs. While still in primary school, I started to read on how to program in BASIC. I taught myself how to write these programs. But the time I was in 6th grade, I would constantly borrow programming books from the library. I was able to eventually write hundreds of lines of programs. My friends would never understand why I would be typing on the ‘command prompt’ when I could load up a video game. But today, I find out that most of my peers and co-workers have similar stories on how they got into computers. Microsoft engineers are probably the biggest ‘Commodore 64’ computer consumers.