James Devine

概要

James Devine joined Microsoft Research in June 2020 to work with Steve Hodges on democratising hardware prototyping and production. His work focuses on designing software, systems and protocols that make complex technologies intuitive and accessible, while balancing ease of use with the constraints of efficient, low-level systems.

James has a strong track record in democratising access to hardware prototyping. He developed the device runtime for the BBC micro:bit (opens in new tab) and subsequently worked on codal (opens in new tab), a generalised runtime for resource-constrained embedded devices, and Jacdac (opens in new tab), a plug-and-play protocol for physical computing and rapid hardware prototyping. These technologies have been used extensively within the Microsoft MakeCode (opens in new tab) ecosystem.

In 2022, James moved to Azure Sphere (opens in new tab), initially focusing on customer acceleration before going on to lead the OS and tooling engineering teams. This gave him extensive experience in platform security and the engineering of security-critical connected systems. As Azure Sphere transitioned towards sustained engineering, his focus shifted to making that model as effective and efficient as possible. This evolved into an AI-first approach to sustained engineering, using agents to automate routine engineering work and allowing engineers to focus on the problems where human judgement and expertise mattered most. This culminated in the release of Azure DevOps Agentic Workflows (ado-aw) a compiler for markdown that turns tasks into compiled pipeline yaml.