Monthly Archives: May 2007

10 year high school reunion at Mardi Gras 2007 – Laissez les bons temps rouler encore a Nouvelle Orleans!

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Only 3 months behind on my blogging…

What a crazy, crazy week.  Wish i could share more, but not really.  You’ll just have to trust me on this one =)

high school reunion photos

pass christian parade, aka Kinski’s photos

Mardi Gras Day photos – all work safe  =)

High School Reunion

OLA Class of 1996

OLA Class of 1996

I took a red-eye out Thursday night to be there, ready to go, to kick-off the reunion tour of Our Lady Academy.  The school had grown quite large after we graduated, but thanks to Katrina, well, um, yeah.  I think the most touching moment was hearing the story how they combined both SSC (the boys’ high school across the street) and OLA just for that year after katrina.  They had all the kids in a large auditorium somewhere, and they asked how many of them had lost everything.  almost 80% of hands went up of 100 or so kids.  Life always goes on.  life always goes on.  always.

We had a pre-party Friday night at a parent’s house.  It was so great to see people not only after 11 years, but after something like Katrina, just knowing everyone was okay.  And, the stories, my god.  We all wholeheartedly thank god we had just missed the Internet; otherwise, omg the stuff we did could be archived for all time.  Although i wish i could recall how i dressed up as a California Raisin doing the "walk like an Egyptian" dance.  Apparently it was funny.

Saturday was the reunion.  We had the restaurant reserved from 3-6pm, but we stayed until 1:30am, going through 3 bands.  To my surprise, i found someone there i could actually explain what i do at work.  Our congressman was there having dinner.  His daughter and i used to sail together.  anyways, i was saying hi asking how Sarah (w/ the ‘h’) was doing, and i realized in mid-sentence, "you know what intellectual property is!!"  And of course he nodded his head, and i said, "I do open source at Microsoft.  I do open source at Microsoft," in this "you can appreciate what i do…"  I did a little dance (pre mardi gras parade warm up routine) in my excitement.  We all just laughed.

Karleen and I went to the Waffle House to debrief about the events of the past 24 hours.  She then gave me the greatest gift i’ve ever been given with this story:

Karleen:  "Yeah, i was in the bathroom when Jill <made up name> asked me how much you made.  So, i said, ‘you know sara, how she is about that stuff, how humble she is and how embarrass she gets.  she doesn’t want anyone to know.’"

Jill:   "Is it 100,000 thousand dollars?"

Karleen:  "Oh please" waving her hand across her face.

Jill:  "Is it 200,000 thousand dollars?"

Karleen:  "Oh please" waving her hand across her face in disgust. 

Jill:  "OMG, how much does she make?!"

Karleen:  "Sara would kill me for telling, but it is around 4"

I about had an asthma attack from laughter in the waffle house.  I should note that i’ve never told Karleen what my salary is, but it isn’t 400k.  As a thank you (additionally, karleen was my personal handler for the trip – i really like to party), i sent her and her family one of the "boats" from Made in Washington, to experience a typical meal on a 400k salary – not like i would know or have any idea, but it was a good guess.  And they *loved* the boat it came in.  =)

Then the band from the reunion had the same Waffle House idea that we had, and joined us at our table.  We went to high school with one of the guys, and the other was a local cop.  It doesn’t take long for a conversation to quickly turn into sharing Katrina stories.  The cop told us how he accompanied a SWAT team into the court house right after Katrina hit.  They didn’t who or what they would find going through records, court cases, etc.  It was incredible.

Pass Christian Parade

Just a quick Mardi Gras 101:  There is no universal theme for Mardi Gras.  And actually, Mardi Gras starts Jan 14 until Tuesday at midnight, just before Lent begins in the catholic church.  The parties just get more and more intense as Mardi Gras week approaches, as more parades roll.  Each parade is run by an organization, so you pay to be a member of that org.  For example, Kinski is the organization that runs the pass christian parade, but we would just call it Kinski’s.  The organization decides what the theme will be.  So, Kinski came up with "an international affair."  Then within the org, you’re broken out into krewes (just like crews), that map to a float.  Each krewe or float comes up with their own theme that relates to the overall theme.  My relatives’ krewe theme was "The Bay of Pigs."

Then came the local Pass Christian Parade.  I was starting to hurt from the non-stop action, but I was managing.  And it was COLD.  Like 40 degrees cold right along the beach.  But alas, it was good times.  An aunt and uncle are long time members of the parade, so they dressed up as pigs for their "Bay of Pigs" theme. 

It was just a great time.  In outlook at work, i had blocked out my vacation time with the Mardi Gras Mambo as the subject "Down in New Orleans where the blues were born, it takes a cool cat to blow a horn…"  And to my delight, there came a float blasting out the Mardi Gras Mambo.  I was in heaven. 

Mardi Gras Day

After hanging out with cousins i haven’t seen in years until 4:30am (anyone keeping track of my lack of sleep), I’m up, again, at 7:30am in my old bedroom.   I run on solar batteries, so I’m up whenever the sun is up.  It’s Lundi Gras (Fat Monday), and i’m taking the day off.  I hang out with my mom going to the local shops and such, trying to support what i can of the local area merchants.

Then comes Mardi Gras day… the crew of family members get together at 6am to head into the city.  we wanted good parking.  and yes, my family represented their Krewe by wearing their pig outfits.

It was incredible.  It was about as crowded as Christmas or Turkey day, no where near as crowded as Mardi Gras, but it was 90% locals.  A local will always dress up for Mardi gras.  it is like Halloween on steroids for us.  Very few people were in typical tourist attire.

My favorite moment was calling a coworker Dylan back in Redmond to logon to the Bourbon Cam, and take a pic of me.  I wonder if he went deaf from our screams.  It was 9am on Mardi Gras Day, but by 4pm, you couldn’t find a square inch of street available to stand on. 

We got home around 5pm, and i was out cold by 8pm.  I was partied out.  done.  no more.  Flew back home on Wednesday, as Mardi Gras 2007 and my 10 year high school reunion was officially over.

Anyways, that’s my report from New Orleans, 3 months late.  As i said in a previous post, life always goes on.  always.  Thanks for allowing me to share with you.

Bay-Waveland Bridge Opens!!!

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Yesterday, the Bay-Waveland Bridge opened, reuniting the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  I can’t even begin to describe the significance of this.  I would say, "imagine if the 520 or I-90 bridge went out one day," but it doesn’t really translate well.  It’s closer to "remember when the power came back after the wind storm," and life was like it is supposed to be.  that’s what the significance of this bridge is… life one step close to what it is supposed to be, although there are still many, many more steps to go.

http://www.wlox.com/Global/story.asp?S=6534088

The Braidy Tester interviews me about software testing on Dr. Dobb’s blog

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Michael Hunter, our very own Braidy Tester, interviews me about software testing.  Yep, it has been a while, well over a year, since i’ve done pure software testing.  But fortunately, he let me pick the 5 questions i wanted to answer =)

http://www.ddj.com/blog/debugblog/archives/2007/05/five_questions_17.html

In the intro, he talks about my custom-built motorcycle.  I wish i were that cool.  The story is i had a custom-built bicycle made from the motorcycle accident i was in.  The rest of the money went to student loans.  Every now and then, i think about getting a motorcycle, but then i put my hand into a fist and hit my leg where after 6 years still hurts from getting hit by the car.  Then i remember why in the ambulance, and the year afterwards, i swore i would never ride a motorcycle again

Should I create a single Power Toys for Visual Studio CodePlex project?

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As I prep for my EE talk, I find myself wondering what I would have done differently a year ago.  Looking at the huge success of the Ajax Control Toolkit, I wonder if I should have had one “Power Toys for Visual Studio” project on CodePlex, where all the power toys (as possible) fit into the collection.  Then, I could have opened up both the individual power toys and the overall collection itself up for contributions.

The thinking last year was to build the community around the individual power toys.  Well after we had released our first wave, I started thinking about building the overall community as a collection of power toys.  Shawn’s feedback (who runs the toolkit) to me has always been “where’s your critical mass?”  I thought I could build the community and the critical mass on the Power Toys Homepage as an eagle eye onto CodePlex, but maybe I was wrong or didn’t try hard enough.

Which brings us to the title of this blog entry.  We’ve just shipped Orcas Beta 1.  So, here I am again, looking at the lessons learned from the Whidbey Power Toys, trying to plan ahead for Orcas.

Question for the Power Toy Community

If we were to combine all of these power toys, what buckets should they fall into?  Or should we leave well enough alone.

My knee-jerk reaction was to bucket based on which Visual Studio version they target.  Then I started realizing this should be a job for the pack installer to sort it all out.  And, tools are going to grow organically on their own, so it would defeat the entire purpose of codeplex to port these tools to a new codeplex project based on VS versioning (not that we would do this intentionally, but if I separated based on versioning, I would be “retrospectively” doing this, if that makes sense.)

Something else to call out is that the baseline commonality between all these tools (besides us writing them) is that they were picked and implemented based on customer suggestions. In other words, these are all after-market solutions for Visual Studio 2005.

Here are the options I’m considering:

Do nothing. Our current set of power toys are scattered across technologies, including what they target (MSBuild, TFS, VS IDE, ASP.NET, etc) and how they are built (stand-alone exes, add-ins, packages). The only way I could bucket all of them together is as a “Power Toy Solutions for Visual Studio 2005.”

Throw them all together into a single “Power Toy Solutions for Visual Studio 2005” Bucket, including the VS 2003 power toys migrated from GotDotNet.  Each power toy will have its own release in the CodePlex project.  We’ll utilize the pack installer as the primary means for downloading the power toys. 

Bucket based on targeted technology. All MSBuild open source power toys go into a MSBuild CodePlex Project.  All TFS open source power toys go into their own TFS bucket, and so forth.  Even if we don’t have enough power toys right now for this, consider it planning for any potential Orcas power toys. Then if we need to port a power toy to Orcas, the codebase stays within the same overall codeplex project.

Bucket only the ones that make sense to bucket – have all the power toys that target the VS IDE together in one bucket, and leave the rest as is. For example, we would have Breakpoint Manager, Resource Refactoring, VSCmdShell, and MSBee. Maybe even Managed Stack Explorer.

After having thought about this for weeks now, I favor option #4.  It builds a community around the technology, and allows these power toys to get updated to Orcas as needed. And it also allows for us to leave well enough alone.

Combined Power Toy Collection Mockup

Prototype Power Toy Homepage showing each Power Toy Image and Description

CodePlex Project Design

Homepage

  • Represents a quick overview of each project
  • Includes all the other content, like download, building, running, etc here
  • Includes a “Incubation Idea Wiki” based off of work items where people can vote, and discussion boards where people can discuss

Discussions (same model for work item tracking)

  • Each power toy represented in the collection will have its own discussion board. Only one discussion board per project
  • There’s a general discussion board for things not related to the design or usage of a power toy

Releases

  • Pack Installer is used as the download mechanism for getting all power toys, in lieu of a zip or global MSI
  • Each release will be available separately as its own release in the release tab

Source Code

  • We’ll have two branches – Incubation and Release. All projects start in incubation and when they hit “a certain level of quality”, we’ll branch to release.
  • All power toys will use a single settings.targets file for including any test and build tools.
  • We’ll merge back to incubation if someone wishes to experiment with an existing power toys as a new project. My current thinking is that this will be rare, as development should continue in the Release branch.

What to do about Orcas Power Toys?

It’s a tough question, but really, should it be? Given what I’ve learned in the past, what’s my recommendation to teams moving forward? Honestly, there isn’t a simple answer. In my perfect world, I would want each product group to have its own set of power toys that they build and allow for customers to add tools to the collection (just like the Ajax Control Toolkit model). Our team would contribute to these projects, rather than creating projects ourselves. Additionally, if a product group had a really cool idea, like a sunset technology or a toolkit collection, they would take it to the open separately from the existing power toys. But that’s just my current thinking and need to shop this around internally to get feedback.

EE Talk May 15: Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys

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Just wanted to share with you some of the internal-facing work I’ve been doing as of late.  Over the past 6 months, I’ve given a series of 3 divisional presentations on giving out Microsoft source code, including

  • “How to release code to the community”
  • “IP Basics” – I had everyone draw a picture of a dog to illustrate copyright. my little claim to fame =)
  • "Embracing Open Source on CodePlex"

Now, it’s time to share to a larger audience.  On May 15, coincidentally the 1-year anniversary of the power toys initial release,  I will give an Engineering Excellence Talk (read: Microsoft’s internal “come share best practices” talk circuit) called "Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys" (internal link).  Have no fear, I will share these lessons learned here on my blog. 

Hope to see the microsofties who read my blog there.  This will be the first time i’ve given a talk with a broken leg. 

Trip Report: Online Community Business Forum

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It’s been an intense couple of days, meeting with those who run online communities in business environments (read: for-profits, not non-profits).  In other words, people there either ran an online community, like a support forum (Apple’s support forums, Dell’s online communities) or discussion board (AOL, etc.), or sold tools and applications to host such online communities.

Technorati tags: ocbf2007

And some pictures of Sonoma (and for those in Seattle – pictures of the sun).  Sadly, i was more in awe of the sun and weather, than i was of the vineyards.

Top Takeaways

  • Currently, there is no global definition for community.  It’s one of those, "you know it when you see it" (thanks to Sean McDonald from Dell for the quote.)  Maybe in time we’ll have a clear definition, like we do today for blogging.
  • The majority agreed that a crisis is needed to build a community.  I’ll go a step further and say that there needs to be a mutual call-to-action for the community to 1. find one another and 2. do something.  Crisis is a great call-to-action.
  • A lot of the online community research mapped very closely to the OSS community research I’ve seen.  This is very interesting from a social engineering (if that’s the right term) perspective.  How we interact online may be constant across any community.  Now if only we can define what an online community is and isn’t…
  • Mike McCamon from iModules.com had the quote of the conference.  I’m horribly paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of "Selling Online Communities to executives today is like trying to sell telephones to executives when they were first invented, when the reaction back in the day was, ‘who would use a phone?’"  That’s so true.

Conference Highlights

  • I unintentionally started the "Women’s Bathroom Community."  – I just started talking to one woman in the bathroom, which caused another 3 to join the conversation, thus spending 20 minutes in the bathroom talking about online communities.  We all went to dinner later.  Oh, I’m bracing myself for the comments to this one.
  • Mac vs PC:  Mark Williams (Apple) and Sean O’Driscoll (MSFT) did a joint session on engaging in your community.  And of course, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a little commercial spoof.  it was an excellent discussion.
  • I really liked the 5 minute open microphone on whatever topic you want. Of course, I got up there and did my 5 minute OSS sales pitch. Never a dull moment.
  • Every conference needs a “wine-tasting break” prior to the “wine-tasting event” prior to the “dinner at the winery.”

Lowlights

  • Having my leg x-rayed the night before flying out.  Nothing broken, but hurts nonetheless.  ouch.  shin splints.  I blame my personal trainer for not listening to my "no lower body workout today, because i did something crazy over the weekend."  And, he blames me for climbing Mt. Si. twice over the weekend.  But he’s still fired.  =)
  • Being too far away to hit josh over the head for being hit by a car and not going straight to the ER.
  • What does "riff" mean?  Does it mean to add to the conversation?  Or to go off on a tangent?  I couldn’t quite pick up on the full context…  For example, "Let me riff on what you are saying…" No one seemed to take offense, so i gathered it didn’t mean "let me rip it apart."

Adventures in Sonoma

I called Gretchen while i was down there with a desperate plea for help ordering wine.  I audited (yes, audited) wine appreciation in college, and i lived with a French family in their vineyard for a little while one summer back in high school, but that’s the extent of my wine knowledge, except for the fact that i can’t distinguish between wines.  They all taste great to me.

Sarah Onat from appc.com (she and i co-founded the bathroom community) and I did dinner both nights, and Friday night we did some sight-seeing and ate dessert at a local cafe on Hwy 12 (?).  Thanks Sarah with the ‘h’ for driving!!

Zoe Hollister from Forumone.com (our tireless event coordinator for the conference) and I spent Saturday as tourists.  When we hit 3 vineyards before noon sampling wine, we realized we had to slow down!  We drove around and to our (happy) surprise, discovered the Napa Premium Outlets and ended up doing some shopping.  =)  Thanks Zoe for driving!!  Hope work on Monday morning isn’t too rough (she took a red-eye back).

And lastly, i’ll sign off by telling my first adventure story of the trip.  It’s about 1-1.5 hours from SFO to Sonoma via car.  Since i was the only passenger, the shuttle driver and i started talking the usual age, rank, and serial number.  When he said he knew what Visual Studio was, i was immediately shocked, then i realized, "oh wait, I’m in the Bay Area" (SFO is the bay area, right?).  Apparently it was his last day on the job, moving full-time to his start-up 30proof.  They are speaking at O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, so best of luck to them during their demo.

And now i’m going to get some sleep…  very long day getting home from sonoma and writing trip reports…

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Welcome SourceForge Visitors!!

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First of all, congrats to the Port 25 team for the Microsoft site on SourceForge.  The same guys who bring you Port 25 are now bringing you a site on SourceForge on what Microsoft is doing in the open source space for the windows platform:  http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/msft

I’m simply blown away to be listed in such great company with Bill Hilf and Jason Matusow.  Wow. We need to add RobMen (WiX) to the list; otherwise, I’m going to be too embarrassed to remain up there (note to self to contact Jamie).  One day when i grow up, i hope to do what RobMen has done in the open source space, especially in terms of paving new ground at Microsoft.  But as one of my longtime linux guru college friends keeps telling me, "patience young grasshopper."  Grr, i have too much energy for patience.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been focused significantly on internal culture changes, making it easier for other teams to "go open," and everything else in between.  Usually, i blog as much as possible about what I do at work, but i’ve been doing a poor job blogging as of late.  But now that i have the honor of sharing web real estate with Bill and Jason, I need to start doing some real blogging again.