Skip to content
A framed certificate of attendance for 'A Glimpse into the World of a Computer Scientist', a Microsoft Research conference in Cambridge, 2005.

Believe in your dreams

Ten years after a Microsoft Research conference in Cambridge, I got the blue badge. A short story about a research clock, a researcher who remembered me, and a dream that took a decade.

4 min read
Continue reading

Ten years ago a Microsoft Research conference handed me a roadmap to my career. I followed it.

The event was called A Glimpse into the World of a Computer Scientist, held at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in 2005. My college had a single place. They sent me.

The certificate of attendance from the 2005 conference, kept on my desk through college, my first job, and into my Microsoft offer letter.

The conference was rocket fuel. I came home with a head full of research papers and a clear answer to the “what do you want to do” question I had been swerving until then. Better still, the trip came with a follow-on: a Microsoft Research project called The Whereabouts Clock, where the team was looking for families willing to test the prototype. We volunteered.

A few months later we were working with Alex Taylor, a researcher in the Socio-Digital Systems team. The clock was a screen, a face split into segments labelled Home, Work, School, with each family member showing in whichever segment their phone said they were in. Imagine the Harry Potter clock from the Weasley kitchen, but driven by SMS and a custom server.

The Whereabouts Clock, 2006. Built to answer a domestic question (where is everyone?) before anyone shipped a consumer app that did the same thing.

The clock was never released. But the idea was everywhere ten years later, in different clothes: Google Latitude (since retired), Apple’s Find My Friends, Microsoft’s Find my Windows Phone, third-party apps like Life360. The research did its job. It got out into the world by other routes.

Find My Friends in 2015. Ten years after the Whereabouts Clock, the same idea now lived on a phone.
Still in rotation a decade later. I have an opinion on bags.

In February I got my blue badge. I joined Microsoft Consulting Services. A few days before the start date I emailed Alex. Ten years on, he still remembered me and my family and the research we did together. He is still at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and he has kindly offered me a tour of the lab.

The story isn’t a fairy tale. It looks like one only in retrospect, because retrospectives smooth out a lot of grit. Ten years between that conference and that badge was ten years of college, a degree, three jobs, and a lot of unglamorous evenings learning things that did not feel related to a Microsoft career at the time. Marshall Aerospace and ClearPeople carried me through most of it.

What I would tell the version of me who got back from Cambridge in 2005 is what Scott Hanselman wrote about the day he got his own blue badge: work on something that lands in the Venn of “what you love”, “what you’re good at”, and “what someone will pay for”. The dream is the intersection, not the wish.

Stuff You Love To Do Stuff You're Good At Stuff Someone Will Pay You To Do Dream Job

Ten years between the certificate and the badge. The certificate is on my desk. The badge is in my pocket. The researcher who handed me the rocket fuel still answers his email. If you have dreams, work them, and keep believing in them.

Back to top More from Journal
1 of 1