Hi. I’m David Millington.

I’m a product manager for a fairly well-known IDE and software development company, where I look after two products. One is large and split among several PMs, and I look after our IDE, debugger, C++ toolchain, and increasingly areas like documentation; on the other, which is a plugin for Visual Studio, I oversee the entire thing. A large amount of software you use has been built with the aid of these tools, and I can say that with certainty despite not knowing what programs you use. This sounds a better reflection on me than it really is: both products are mature, and I stepped in at the time they were already influential. Other people did the hard work of making them popular: I have followed in their footsteps as best as I can, but owe my predecessors a great deal.

I’m Australian, but live in far-northern Europe, in Estonia. It’s usually known as the home of Skype, but to me it’s a land of forests. It also gets very cold in winter.

Things I care about include:

• My wife, an increasingly well-known and very skilled poet, whom I admire as a person entirely outside our relationship;
• Doing things well. At work, I call this ‘polish’: the degree to which something is not just done, but attention paid to the small things. Quality, perhaps is a good word. This often visibly falls out as attention to clarity, understanding what makes an easy interface (a complex job and something I especially love), layout, and more. As a user, it should be clear that care has been taken creating what you use.
• Nature. We are animals: while I enjoy city life as much as anyone, there’s something about leaves and silence that brings peace. I am fortunate to live outside the city. I like breathing forest air. I do not like the thought of a multi-degree temperature rise in our climate.

If you like what I write, you can find me on LinkedIn. I don’t check it very often, so please don’t expect a next-day response. Good messages are some note about a mutual interest or the site. Or asking me to join your company to oversee a UI redesign!