When Shivam Pankaj Kumar talks about code, there’s a spark in his voice that’s hard to miss.
He still remembers the moment it began: second grade, a school computer lab, and a tiny green turtle crawling across the screen.
“I started with Logo,” he laughs. “You typed commands, and it would draw shapes. It was like magic.”
From there, curiosity took over. QBASIC. Java. C++. Every language was another puzzle to solve. By the time he finished his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science, coding wasn’t just something he did, it was how he thought.
That mindset carried him into Microsoft, where he interned and later worked full-time on large-scale projects built on Azure. The work was fast-paced and impactful, but one small, forgotten piece of software would end up leaving a big mark.
The Forgotten Tool
Here’s something most people never think about: what happens when the software that’s supposed to help you fix other software… breaks?
Inside Microsoft’s massive monitoring system, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), which helps thousands of companies keep their IT infrastructure running. SCOM runs using complex workflows called Management Packs. But when something went wrong inside those workflows, debugging can be especially tricky.
To help with that, Microsoft built a debugging tool called Workflow Analyzer (WFAnalyzer)
“A lot of third-party tools were popping up to make SCOM workflows visible,” Shivam recalled. “Then one day, a senior engineer mentioned WFAnalyzer – a tool built for this exact purpose. Turns out, nobody had touched it in a long time.”
Reviving the Black Box
The thing about SCOM is that when something breaks, the error might not be clear. No readable log. Just silence.
“You’re basically flying blind,” Shivam said.
So he decided to fix that. At first, the goal was simple: make the tool work again. He modernized the old codebase, updated dependencies, and fixed compatibility issues. But as soon as it ran, he saw a bigger opportunity.
He added real-time data visualization, built performance metrics for CPU and memory tracking, and even introduced a timeline slider – a “time travel debugging” tool that let engineers rewind through workflow execution to pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong.
“The time slider was my favorite part,” he said. “You could literally watch the issue happen, and then rewind it. It drew a lot of inspiration from Microsoft’s own Time Travel Debugging paradigm.
The Quiet Wins
WFAnalyzer wasn’t a flashy startup launch or a viral app. But for engineers inside Microsoft and countless customers downstream, it means a lot.
When I asked what else he’d worked on at Microsoft, he rattled off a few other projects:
There was his work on Project Aquila, alongside the rest of the product group, where he helped move SCOM’s infrastructure to the cloud and set up automation to cut deployment times. There was OMIGOD, a pretty serious security vulnerability that made headlines in 2021, where he worked on compiler hardening for some affected binaries. And during his internship, he built a simulator that could spin up a million fake monitoring agents just to see if systems would break at scale.
Why It Matters
It’s not a glamorous story. There’s no billion-dollar exit, no celebrity co-founder moment. Just an engineer who found something broken, fixed it, and made everyone’s lives easier.
But maybe that’s the story we don’t tell enough, the quiet, technical heroics that make the digital world actually work.
“All code will break, especially AI code” Shivam said. “We need to make it easier to see where.”
He’s right. As more of the world’s code is written by machines, tools like WFAnalyzer built to understand the invisible might just be the next frontier.
From a curious kid with a turtle on a screen to a seasoned engineer, Shivam Pankaj Kumar has never stopped doing the same thing: taking things apart just to see how they work, and making sure the next person doesn’t have to.
