Bill Gates Award

At the Company Meeting, it was announced that Dave Cutler won the new Bill Gates Award, which is meant to recognize those who have made the absolute highest contributions to Microsoft (the award will be given only in years in which a suitable candidate emerges, and Bill has promised to return to present it. It is different from the Gates Award for Global Health, which is given by his Foundation and is sometimes referred to incorrectly as the "Bill Gates Award"). I have previously written that Microsoft has too many of these awards; Cutler earlier this year won a TCN Award which was meant to be the supreme award for contributions to Microsoft, but now the Bill Gates Award is the new ultra-supreme award for contributions to Microsoft. Notwithstanding that, Cutler certainly deserves any accolades that Microsoft chooses to heap upon him; if you want to show that an engineering honor really has meaning you have to give it to Cutler first, then everybody else can get in line behind him.
I had the privilege of working under Cutler for about 4 years, working on the first two versions of Windows NT. Looking back, I can appreciate how lucky it was that I spent some of my formative years in that group, where Cutler had imposed quality engineering discipline as a basic fact of existence. I know that sounds sappy and I'm not usually given to such mawkish sentiment, but in this case it is justified. In the overlay of The Soul of a New Machine onto the early development of NT, Cutler obviously fills the Tom West role of gruff-but-caring leader, but he was also in there everyday hacking on the core of the kernel.
Earlier in the Company meeting they showed a quick snippet of Cutler walking on stage to accept the TCN Award, accepting the applause with the typical expression he displays in such situations (which is best described by quoting Porky Pine: "I almost feel like smiling myself"). And I felt a big goofy smile creeping onto my face. Cutler was not actually at the Company Meeting to accept the award, but he recorded a nice thank you message.
When Bill Gates was introducing the winner of his eponymous award, he mentioned something about how if you ever broke the build you certainly knew Dave. Which leads me to my favorite Dave Cutler story. At one point during the development of NT, Cutler decided to sit in the build lab and personally supervise all checkins to the source code tree, to inspire people to be a bit more careful about breaking the build. Well, one fine day there was a break in the Build Verification Tests, which was eventually traced down to my code (breaking the BVTs, which tended to ferret out interactions between different components that might be hard to find on your personal test machine, was considered somewhat of an occupational hazard and not in itself evidence of shoddy work). I debugged the problem in the lab and figured out that the problem was not initializing a variable to zero. So I told Cutler I would go back to my office to fix it, which I promptly did by zipping across the hall, checking out the file, adding an "= 0" to the declaration of the variable, then checking it back in. After I returned to the lab and announced that the problem was fixed, Cutler synced the files onto the official build machine and started to build it--at which point it was revealed that my change didn't even compile. It turns out that the variable in question was a 64-bit integer, which back in the day was a struct with two 32-bit integers in it, so the initialization had to look like "= { 0, 0 }". Of course it was obvious that I had not even compiled the change before checking it in, which was a no-no. Cutler decided to just fix it and check it in directly from the build machine (which was unusual). Every checkin has a comment associated with it (which is stored permanently), and when Cutler checked it in he started typing the comment "fix Adam's fuc"...but then gave me a mischievous grin, backspaced that out, and just wrote "fix build break".
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