Karel Zikmund

Events, Conferences, Public Appearances

2023

  • 2/20 - Tech talk at FIT VUT - Brno, CZ
    • War stories from .NET team - internal-only video
    • Discussion with students - not recorded

2022

2021

  • 10/26 - Tech talk at FI MUNI - Brno, CZ
    • What’s new in .NET 6 (not recorded)
    • War stories from .NET team (not recorded)
    • Q&A (not recorded)

2020

2019

2018

2017

Mentions

Job History

See also my LinkedIn profile.

Microsoft

I am on .NET team since my start at Microsoft in 2005:

  • 2016/9-today - Manager on .NET Libraries team (.NET Core, Runtime repo, Base Class Libraries)
    • Manager of Networking area (client stack and low-level APIs like Sockets, DNS)
    • Manager of a few additional .NET Libraries areas (beside Networking):
      • Process, Infrastructure, etc. - until 2019/10
      • Security, Collections, etc. - until 2017/9
    • Roles in CoreFX repo prior to repos consolidation - until 2019/11:
      • Driver of .NET Core releases in CoreFX repo.
      • Community manager on CoreFX repo - issue management, dealing with hot/problematic issues, ensuring smooth involvement of CoreFX community, transparency with CoreFX community, etc.
  • 2015/12-2016/8 - Manager of .NET Native toolchain team
    • Responsible for customer feedback response, test infrastructure (mainly functional and application compatibility), test results monitoring, Visual Studio and Microsoft Store integration.
    • Driver of .NET Native releases.
  • 2012-2015/11 - Manager of CLR Performance and Reliability team
    • Responsible for some Runtime feature areas: Eventing (EventSource, logging, PerfCounters) and GC (Garbage Collector).
    • Responsible for perf and realiability goals, tooling and infrastructure across .NET Framework, .NET Core and .NET Native.
    • Responsible for .NET Quick Response Team - first response, investigation and routing.
    • Hiring manager for CLR team (informational meetings, interview loops + scheduling).
  • 2005-2012 - SW Engineer on CLR team
    • owner/co-owner of CLR components: shim (mscoree.dll), MetaData, TypeSystem, Loader (incl. Fusion, AppX/WinRT loader), NGen.

References:

Previous Jobs

  • 2003/12-2005/9 (2 years) - Sun Microsystems - Quality Engineer Team Lead
    • Quality Engineer on NetBeans IDE (opensource Java IDE) in Sun’s Prague, CZ subsidiary.
    • I have worked mainly on webapps module and lead the webapps QE team since 2004/9
    • Most interesting and valuable experiences:
      • Development and testing for Java/JSP/J2EE.
      • Quality Engineering for Tools for Developers.
      • Team lead position (bug triage, driving area quality, coordinating area test plans and focus) since 2004/9.
      • Open source project (working with public bug database Bugzilla and source code, involved community, participating in open source community).
      • Cross platform product (Solaris, Linux and Windows support).
      • Close and productive cooperation between dev and test teams, and also UI/doc teams.
    • References: list of bugs I touched and my name in public documents
  • 1998/11-2003/12 (5 years) - Secunet - Developer / Quality Assurance Engineer
    • Developer and Quality Assurance Engineer in Secunet’s Prague subsidiary.
    • Work during studies at university.
    • Most interesting and valuable experiences:
      • QA certification (incl. QA process creation based on legal code and ISO standards).
      • Meetings with customers (incl. public administration representatives).
      • Development in C++ on Windows (security-based components, low-level programming of smart card readers, PGP modification prototype).
      • Web site creation - HTML, awk, scripting content updates.

Education

  • 2002-2003 (1 year) - PhD program (finished without graduation) in Computer Science at Charles University in Prague, CZ
    • Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague (MFF UK).
    • Study topic: Computer Science - Neural Networks.
    • Finished without graduation in second year.
  • 1996-2002 (6 years) - MSc (Mgr.) in Computer Science at Charles University in Prague, CZ
    • Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague (MFF UK).
    • Major specialization: Computer Science (Neural networks, Non-procedural programming, Logic and Set theory).
    • Master thesis: Non-standard set theory
    • Notable projects:
      • War++ team project (C++)
        • Multiplayer game engine & game with custom object-oriented scripting language for unit AI (Starcraft/Broodwar without unit limitations).
        • All components server, client, map editor, etc.
        • 2.5 year project in team of 5 (with 4 members landing jobs in Microsoft later).
        • Largest faculty project to that date (1M+ lines of code).
        • My main responsibility was server simulation (heavy multi-threading, game loop, units interaction, etc.)
      • awk interpreter for Windows (C++)
      • MasterMind game (C++, Win32)
      • M&M web site (HTML, JavaScript, PHP)
    • Activities and Societies: M&M - the correspondence-based competition in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science for high school students. Lead organizer around 2000-2003.
  • 1992-1996 (4 years) - High School at Gymnazium Jihlava in Jihlava, CZ
    • Achievements:
      • 1996 - 45th Czech national olympiad in Informatics - Successful Solver
      • 1996 - 45th Czech national olympiad in Mathematics - Successful Solver
    • Notable projects:
      • 1994 - Warehouse inventory (Visual C++, MS Access DB) - contract-based custom SW (from scratch). Multi-level warehouse inventory (resources, mid-products, final products). Motivation: Custom end-to-end SW development.
      • 1993 - Address book (x86 assembler) - character-based Text User Interface application and generic Text UI framework “TextVision” (motivated by Turbo Vision). Fully functional and used in couple of small businesses. Motivation: Learn x86 assembler.
    • Activities and Societies:
      • PiKoMat in Luzanky, Brno - the correspondence-based competition in Mathematics for 5-8 grade students (organizer).