Forrest Coward
Principal Software Engineering Lead at Microsoft
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolForrest Coward is a Principal Software Engineering Lead at Microsoft with 11+ years of experience building developer tooling, DevOps pipelines, and performance-focused infrastructure for Visual Studio. He combines hands-on backend engineering with systems architecture to optimize both the inner build-test-debug loop and the integrate-release-monitor lifecycle. As a manager he blends technical mentorship with inclusive team-building, prioritizing both enjoyment and productivity. Forrest’s long tenure at Microsoft—from intern to principal—reflects deep institutional knowledge of developer platforms and a knack for automating repetitive workflows that accelerate engineering velocity. He’s comfortable across the stack and particularly skilled at turning operational pain points into scalable, developer-centric solutions.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at University of Washington
Stackoverflow
113reputation
8kreached
7answers
5questions
Github Skills (44)
viewer9
azure8
command-line-interface8
azure-aks8
sdk8
nuget8
revit-api8
msbuild8
csharp7
azure-cli7
targets7
powershell7
arm7
version-control6
logging6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
forrestcoward/forrestcoward.github.io
Feb 2015 - Oct 2018
Showcase for various javascript visualizations
Contributions:55 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 8 months
javascriptshowcasevisualizationsvisualization
forrestcoward/sc2-replay-analysis
Feb 2015 - Feb 2015
Contributions:6 commits, 5 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
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