John Alexander

John leads Developer And Engineer Relations on the Microsoft Autonomous Systems team. He has a passion for designing and building accessible experiences using machine learning coupled with vision, voice, touch, and virtual/mixed reality.

John participated in the Xbox Accessible Controller beta and the launch video. He was on the award-winning Hackathon 2020 Elev8: Accessible Guitar Team. These are two of his proudest accomplishments.

Before joining Microsoft, John was the co-founder of a digital agency and consultancy and had the honor of being a Microsoft Regional Director for 19 years, where he participated in scheduled strategic feedback sessions with Microsoft senior leadership teams.

John co-founded the largest technical blogging community in the world, Geekswithblogs.Net, before selling it several years ago. He’s co-authored three best-selling technical books and Microsoft Official Curriculum.

John has a proven track record in high-profile international public speaking and presentations in front of some of the most demanding audiences, both executive and technical. He’s coached several teams of developers, leading one directly responsible for earning their organization a place on CIO Magazine’s “Agile 100” list.

He also built music chart applications for Billboard Magazine used by "American Top 40” and architected a highly scalable Mutual Funds Trading SOA-based platform used non-stop for the last 21 years to process billions of dollars in transactions.

In his spare time, John sat in Kirk's Chair on the bridge, recorded cartoon pilots as part of a voice ensemble cast, is the co-creator of the "Geek" t-shirt (found at most Microsoft conferences) and was Facebook friends with Patrick Swayze.