Charles Petzold



Retirement and Realignment

September 14, 2018
Sayreville, New Jersey

Effective today, I have resigned my employment at Microsoft, concluding an engaging and delightful 4½ years as part of the Xamarin documentation team. I will miss my co-workers immensely, and I hope to keep in touch with them on Facebook.

Simultaneously, I am retiring from my 34-year career of writing, speaking, and thinking about programming and APIs. This career has taken me from assembly language MS-DOS utilities in the back pages of PC Magazine; to many years of C, C++, and C# Windows code in books and in articles in MSJ and MSDN Magazine; to cross-platform mobile development in C#. It's been a wonderful journey that I hope has benefited the developer community as much as it has been personally rewarding to me.

I am making these decisions so that I can shift my full attention to a long-term project to write several books on various milestones in the historical foundations of computing, of which The Annotated Turing was the first and Computer of the Tides will (I hope) be the second.

And who knows? Perhaps my best and most enduring work is yet to come!