I'm leaving Microsoft to work for a startup, after nearly 5 years here. I'll be a Technical Project Manager at Mercent, starting in mid-July. Next week is my last week here.
Microsoft has been a great place for me to build my career - I spent more time here than at Deloitte, and have more than doubled my time in the technology industry. It's been really fantastic to work with a bunch of smart people at a company that treats its employees well.
Since I posted so infrequently, about random topics, I know I don't have too many readers. But if you're interested in staying in touch, you can check out my personal blog. I'm more likely to discuss my last shopping trip, or great meal at a restaurant than a technology topic (unless it's to gush about a new gadget I'm coveting), but I hope to see a few of you there. (You know who you are!)
Thanks for reading, and sorry I didn't post more often!
For a day off, today was pretty productive in terms of my career. Or at least for my career planning anyway.
One of the things I've been meaning to do for a while is get my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. I've been doing various forms of project management for almost my entire time in the technology industry, from that first day in glamorous Butte, MT. My manager at Deloitte told me she wanted me to manage the project database, which included keeping track of all the deliverables for the project, tracking our team's expenses and hours, preparing the invoice for the client, and reporting how we tracked to our budget back to the main office. For someone right out of school, it was a great first assignment, to learn about project management and in general, the inner workings of a client-service project from start to finish.
Getting the PMP certification requires 4500 hours of project management work, which is about 3 years, so I've totally got that covered. I contacted one of my Deloitte managers and she agreed to be a reference for me. My previous manager at Microsoft also agreed, so I've got that part covered.
Another requirement is taking 35 hours of in-class training. The Seattle chapter of the Project Management Institute offers a twice-yearly course that prepares you for the certification exam, which also conveniently counts for this classroom requirement. Unfortunately I missed the spring session because I was drinking daiquiris in Puerto Rico that week. But our local community college offers a whole series of project management courses which you can take as part of a certificate plan, or just individually. I figured out I can take a one day course at Microsoft and two of the courses at Bellevue Community College to meet that 35 hour requirement. And even better, Microsoft will pay for those external courses. The other fabulous thing is that taking these courses also fulfills one of the career goals I set for the year, to take some additional PM training.
I had lunch today with a friend who's a PMP and this set the whole plan into motion. Turns out one of the classes I want to take at BCC starts next Wednesday (how convenient). So I figured there's no time like the present, and asked my manager for approval to take those courses. Which he promptly agreed to, so I signed up for them tonight. I'm looking forward to it. I have always loved the Project Management aspects of being a PM at Microsoft, and now I'm just going to formalize my interests.
After the classes are done in August, I'll complete the online application on the PMI site, and then schedule the exam when I get their approval. I hope to take the exam within a month or two of finishing the classes so the info is still fresh in my mind. And I'll hopefully also stay in the studying frame of mind.
I think this is a good use of working part time - this work will eventually benefit me in my job. I'm really looking forward to my "Planning and Scheduling" course which starts next week, since I've got to work on our detailed SDK project schedule in the next week or so. Perfect timing, isn't it?
Marshall, who I met through the Speech Server TAP program, has bugged me about my dormant blog a few times now, so here I am with a new post for you. It's embarassing how long it's been since I last posted. Especially since I include a link to this blog in my email signature. And we all know how much email Microsofties send every day. It's amazing.
So here I am, about 3.5 months into my "new" job as an SDK PM for System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Reading over my old posts from my early days on the job has made me realize just how much I have learned in the past few months. It's never as fast as I would like, but really, I'm pretty happy with how far I've gotten.
I wrote my first spec, for the Setup portion of the SDK. Not glamorous but it needed to be done so our Setup developer could build us a Windows Installer package to install the documentation and code samples that make up the SDK. Today I filled out the request form for our legal team to prepare our End User License Agreement (again, a less than thrilling job that's all part of the random stuff Program Managers do) and I realized that I could fill out the entire form, with only one question for Rinki, my job-share partner. Small victories, but they're good reassurance that I'm making progress, and I actually feel like I'm truly useful now.
Working part time is also going well. We have a teamwide policy of no meetings on alternate Fridays, which results in all Fridays being pretty light on meetings. So I don't seem to miss much by not being around on Fridays. I've been somewhat flexible with my schedule so if there's an important meeting on a Thursday, I'll come in for it, unless I'm out of town. This team is also very respectful and accepting of the flex work thing - I've gotten no snide comments about working part time or being less committed to my job. In fact, most people I talk to want to know how they can work part time too, until they realize it also comes with a pay cut. :D
So far, so good. What's going on out there? Or have I managed to drive away all my readers by posting so infrequently?
Our Thanksgiving trip to Tucson was very nice. My husband and I drove back to Seattle, which I had anticipated to be a nice leisurely drive, but turned into a "let's just get home", boring freeway, 12-15 hours a day sort of road trip. On the bright side, we did manage to hit In-N-Out Burger for lunch one day, and saw some friends in the Bay Area.
We're coming up to a pretty quiet time at work. A lot of folks are forced to take vacation or else they'll lose it. Microsoft will let you carry over a year's worth of vacation. It's surprising to me how many people don't take all of their vacation and thus run the risk of losing some at the end of the year. Maybe that means I'm a slacker. I've got just a few days of vacation left this year. (And I don't mean that those are the days I'll forfeit - that's actually all I have to carry over.)
Now I'm starting to dig into some real work and feeling a little less useless. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm adding huge value to the team, but I'm definitely moving out of "just learning" mode. Slowly. I'm putting together a "Vision and Scope" document for a project I've been given and working with the User Assistance (UA) guys, learning about their tools and processes and what we've done in the past for the SMS SDK.
I often wish I could fast-forward to be 6 or 9 months into the job, at that point where I'm clear about what I'm doing, confident enough to speak up at meetings, and just generally feeling like I have it together. Now I've just got this nagging stressed out feeling that I'm picking things up too slow and not working hard enough (doesn't help that I'm here only 3 days a week). I suppose those are just normal things that happen with joining a new team, as well as starting a part time schedule.
At some point in the not too distant future, I hope to post about our upcoming SDK for System Center Configuration Manager 2007. I've got a list of features that I'm responsible for in the SDK docs and code samples so I'm trying to come up to speed on the biggest one: software distribution. It's a great place to start since it's the heart of SMS. That also makes it huge and complicated but that's sure better than being bored.
So, does anyone out there have any thoughts about the SMS SDK? Have you downloaded it from the Microsoft Download Center?
I am just getting ready to leave the office to take care of some last minute items before leaving for Tucson early tomorrow. I thought I'd write a quick blog post since it's been a few weeks since the last one.
I'm slowing ramping up on SMS 2003, and also understanding what's going to be in SCCM 2007. It's going better than I expected but of course, I'd prefer the knowledge and understanding to be instantly uploaded into my brain, rather than over a period of months...
I got my desktop system all set up today (finally!). I installed Vista and Office 2007 on it. After a few hiccups, I got connected to the domain. Apparently somehow the network install from MS IT joined me to a workgroup, so I could only get to certain things on the network. Props to me for figuring out by myself what the problem was. Those Win 2000 MCSE classes sure do pay off at random times.
This is the first time I've used Vista, and wow are the graphics impressive. There's a small learning curve associated with finding stuff, not quite as bad as the move from Win2000 to XP, but still noticeable. My very early impression of Vista is that it's just so *pretty*.
And IE 7, which is included with Vista, is also very different. I haven't used it enough to comment on the features yet but having tabs available for pages is really cool. (Yes, I know Firefox already had that. I don't use Firefox so it's new to me.)
I played around (for way too long) last night with Ed Holloway's Ink Blog plug-in for Windows Live Writer. I got it to work on my personal blog, so I think I might try it out occasionally here too. It lets you blog using the handwriting feature on a Tablet PC. Too cool. I've been wondering how to do that for a while, and just ran across this tool in an Internet search.
So I guess the subtitle of this post is "cool technology that I'm thankful for". Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy your time off!
Well, I'm at the end of my last day of work for the week. So far, this part time thing is working out great :)
So what did I accomplish this week? Met a bunch of people on the team (super-important for a PM), got through a few modules of an online training course for SMS 2003, read a few more chapters of The Book and the CPD Guide, looked at a bunch of documents on how our team's processes work, went to a few meetings and got my office partially set up. Not bad for 3 days.
The thing I am most excited about is that my "studying" is already paying off. I went to a meeting where some design changes were being discussed and for several of the items I could actually follow the discussion. This was very encouraging to me, as it usually takes me a few weeks to get to that point where the jargon and acronyms start making sense. I guess I'm finally getting enough experience to see that most software projects are very similar and there are consistent "themes" in all the products I've worked on here at Microsoft.
I do have one meeting to attend tomorrow - a lot of "getting started" information about the SMS SDK. I'll be attending by phone since Thursday is one of my days off, but since the subject matter is important to me, I'm not too worried about it. Plus I can attend in my PJs, with sleeping dogs on the floor next to me, and no one will be any wiser. (unless they've read this blog, of course!)
So who's actually reading this? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Leave me a comment to let me know this isn't going off into the great Internet Recycle Bin!!
I guess it's pretty clear that I'm just getting settled into my new job, since I've actually had time to post to my blog two days in a row! Late yesterday, my stuff got moved over from Bldg 17, so my office-mate/job-share partner and I tried to figure out how to get all this stuff to fit comfortably in our shared office. This is the first time I've had to share an office at Microsoft, so it's a little weird. By nature I'm a quiet, private person, and get distracted with a lot of background noise.
Fortunately, my officemate Rinki isn't very loud, and I need to ask her a lot of questions while I'm ramping up, so this works out well. The other bonus is that 2 days a week she has the office to herself since I don't work on Thursdays and Fridays. And she leaves early each day, so after 2:30 on my work days, the office is all mine. So really, this sharing thing isn't bad at all, and I do realize I'm still incredibly lucky to have a workspace with an actual door that closes. As a consultant, I always got squeezed into cubes, random conference rooms, or whatever available open space was available, so I'm definitely not complaining too much now.
My manager sent out the introductory e-mail about me today so various people have been dropping by the office and introducing themselves, which is nice. And I've had lunch both days with Rinki and others on the team so I'm not too lonely.
When I went back to Bldg 17 to make sure everything was in order for the office move, I felt a little bit sad. After all, I knew everyone there, knew exactly what I was supposed to do, how the team worked, etc. Starting out in a new job is always tough - the ambiguity and feeling of complete confusion in the beginning is so hard to deal with! A wise friend once told me that you have to give it 3 months before you can really evaluate how things are going. To be more precise, her statement was "Any new job sucks for the first three months", just because there's so much to learn.
Today I completed the first module of a multi-media SMS 2003 training course, got my office sort of set up, am working my way through another overview doc, and am currently copying a Virtual Server image of SMS to my machine so I can play around with it. It's slow going, but I can only go up from here, right?
I woke up this morning at 6:15 without an alarm and actually got out of bed and was ready for work by 7:15. What's going on here?
It's my first day of work at the new job!
Now that I'm in Building 44, my commute to work has almost doubled. It might actually be a little over 2 miles now. :) Since I got in so early I got a great parking spot, which is no small feat since parking is getting tight in most places on campus. And just for a few days I get to camp out in an awesome window office while I wait for my stuff to be moved from Bldg 17. At that point I'll be sharing an office with my job share partner, Rinki.
So here I am. I've just installed Office OneNote 2007 so I can use it to take notes on all the reading I'm doing about Systems Management Server. Rinki was kind enough to go through "the book" on SMS and mark which chapters were important for me to read. Which amounts to a few hundred pages, not to mention the Concepts, Planning and Deployment Guide on the Microsoft SMS website. So there will be a lot of reading, notetaking, and hopefully, learning going on over the next couple of weeks (months?).
I even managed to get invited to the morning "coffee run" with some of the other folks on the team. I'm bad with names so now I have to surreptitiously peek at peoples' access badges since I think I've met most of the other PMs between this morning and the team outing last Friday. Sad.
So I'm hoping to get through the first few months' of cluelessness that comes with any new job as quickly as possible. Do you have any tips on how to learn a new technology and team processes quickly?
I guess I'm on the "every other month" posting schedule here. Maybe that's just the natural rhythm of things and I shouldn't feel bad about it. Then again, just this week, two of my TAP partners asked me if I was planning to blog more often. And the answer is, yes, I'm *planning* to blog more often, but the reality just doesn't quite work out that way.
So what am I busy with this week? Well, for starters, I am transitioning all of my duties to a few other people on my team. That's right, folks, I am moving on to another team at Microsoft. While I *love* managing the Speech Server TAP program, it hasn't been great for the work/life balance side of things. That wasn't really Microsoft's fault as much as my own. I need some time to focus on some personal stuff (like the 25+ pounds I've gained since my wedding last May - where the heck did that come from???).
For the past few months I've been fantasizing about what it would be like if I had a long weekend every week. I envied the few friends I have who are working part time (mostly due to new babies) or have taken significant time off from working altogether. And then it occurred to me: I could change my work schedule if I wanted to.
I was raised to always focus on education, so I could get that great job to pay for all my material needs, and work hard there to advance through the company and make more money, to secure mine and my (hypothetical) childrens' futures. So I worked hard in 16+ years of school, and 7+ years of working in the technology industry. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely paid off. I'm happy with my success, my house, and the new car I was able to buy. I don't think too hard about buying that $3 chai latte at Starbucks or a new pair of cute unnecessary shoes every few months. And in general, people seem to like the work that I do, so that's good.
So it was a little weird for me to think about cutting back, both on my career trajectory and on my salary itself. I'm the typical geeky overachiever. I expect to get As in all my classes, and to do everything as perfectly as I can, and always have my eye on that next promotion, etc.
But you know what? When I really thought about what *I* want, it's simple. More time to myself. A job that I love, just from the day to day perspective. I don't really *want* to be a VP, and I definitely don't enjoy playing the "game" to get more visibility, toot my own horn, etc. Obviously, I need to make enough money to pay the bills and save for later, and still buy the occasional pair of cute unnecessary shoes. But really, that's not much.
So I had a serious discussion with my husband a few months ago about hypothetically working part time and how that would impact our financial situation. We've been incredibly lucky/blessed so it turns out we'll be just fine even if I scale back. I'll need to make fewer trips to Starbucks, and we'll need to eat at home more often (which is better for us anyway), but those small things are worth me getting a couple of days a week back to myself.
In typical overachiever style, I've already got a list of what I want to do with those extra 2 days a week. Lots of home organization projects, sorting out the remodel of our living room, and finally getting to the gym 5 days a week like I should. Not to mention adventurous outings around Seattle with my 2 dogs. And I will learn how to be more "wifely", you know, like cooking meals, learning how to sew buttons back on to shirts, and stuff :)
So starting next week, I'll be taking a new job on the System Center Configuration Manager (product formerly known as Systems Management Server, or SMS) team, as half of a jobsharing arrangement. Two of us will be Program Managers for the SDK. Besides being able to work part-time, I'm really excited about the role itself. It's the most technical position I've had at Microsoft. Which means I'll get to learn a bunch of new stuff and increase my geek quotient even more. Woo hoo.
But it's always sad to leave a job that has been so good to me. I'll miss my teammates on the Unified Communications Application Server team (formerly known as MSS). I regret not being around until we ship our product but I'm glad I got to be a part of the process. The good thing is that I'll get to see everyone at the Holiday Party since my husband is on the same team.
I'd like to give a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to all of my TAP partners who made the last year the most fun of my entire career. You guys are a great bunch of partners and customers and I hope you'll keep in touch. I'll buy you a fancy Starbucks coffee when you come to Redmond, so definitely take me up on that, ok?
And yes, Marshall, I will try to blog more often on the new team, thanks for the encouragement.
Yikes. Yet again, I've waited too long to post to my blog. I can't believe it's been 2 months!!
I actually have a real speech-related topic this time, though. Last week, I went to the 5-day course called "Speech Applications: Planning, Voice User Interface Design, and Tuning" held in Seattle. It was taught by Bruce Balentine and David Attwater from EIG, one of our Speech partners (and a TAP participant!).
I was a little worried at the prospect of going to a 5-day class and the mountains of work that awaited me back at the office. But wow, it was totally worth it. Both of the instructors were extremely knowledgable and had a lot of real-world experience and examples to back up what they were saying. Unlike many other technical classes I've taken, the instructors didn't just read from the PowerPoint slides but just used them as a general outline to impart their wisdom to us.
There were a few group exercises which really reinforced what we were learning and actually gave me some great insight into what our customers do with their IVRs since everyone else in the course was working on an IVR for their company or for a client.
The course material was developed by Microsoft, but the class itself doesn't focus exclusively on Microsoft solutions, rather it's a more general intro to ASR, IVR systems and the specific design principles to use based on what we know about human factors and psychology.
I originally signed up for it a year ago, when I was relatively new to the Speech Server team, but I was sick the week of the class, so I was allowed to attend this session to make it up. I wish I had been able to take the class last year - it would have given me more of a technical background to understand the issues and feedback our customers have been reporting through our TAP and Beta programs.
In short, it was a fantastic class and a great use of my time. I'm usually very critical about classes but this one was well worth it.
It may seem expensive, but the things you'll learn about VUI design will translate into $$ saved for your company when more of your customers stick with your well-designed IVR app rather than asking to speak with an agent.
If you have any specific questions about the class, please post them in the comments and I'll try to answer them. The next session is in Chicago next month - check it out! (Really, no one is paying me for this review. It really was *that* good.)
I've got a bad 80s heavy metal song in my head, and I can't even find out what it is either via MSN Search or Google. Oh well, I suppose I have more important things to do.
Well, it's review time again here at Microsoft. As you'll see on many other MS blogs out there, they've revised our system (yet again!). I guess I should be glad there are constant revisions to improve things, rather than a stagnant bad system.
The basic process is the same, though: Review what you've done in the past year, figure out if you met your goals, and write it all up. And that's the painful part. It shouldn't be difficult but it just seems like this large looming task. Like the 10-page paper in school that you waited until the night before it was due to complete it. So I've written about a quarter of my review, and here I am procrastinating. (It's due tomorrow) But hey - posting in my blog was one of my commitments for the year. So there!
Well, the TAP program is proceeding along nicely - people seem to be making good progress building their MSS 2007 applications. I especially appreciate the 6 participants who have sent us a demo number to their applications that we can use internally. I send the phone numbers to the team to try out, and get feedback from the team on the app. It's also great for the team to see *real* customers building *real* applications on our platform. Kind of makes the whole software development/shipping a product thing concrete.
And our Beta program, which is a much larger group of participants, is also starting out well. We switched to a slightly different paradigm for answering questions -- we've used newsgroups in the past, but for this Beta I set up a "listserv". (Yay 1990s technology!). There are pros and cons to each method, but I chose an email discussion list because that was the easiest way to ensure our product team could see the participants questions immediately (and passively, since most people have email up all the time here.) With a newsgroup you have the extra step of opening your NNTP client and checking it for new posts. With email, the stuff just shows up.
Part of my responsibilities involve making sure the questions are answered and tracking stats for the list like # of posts and topics covered. The cool thing about email is that people have been jumping on it right away. So there are very few questions that I need to proactively find an owner for. The other good thing is that the list is archived online (securely!) so people can review past messages as well. There's a lot of traffic on the list, but it's been on-topic and respectful, for the most part.
Oh, and the Connect site has been upgraded to version 2.0, with some very cool features around configuring feedback forms and displaying existing feedback submitted. I will probably make some tweaks here over the next few weeks, to automate some of the sorting I do of all the different types of pre-release bugs and suggestions that come in.
So what do you think of the new Connect site, the Beta listserv, or anything else our team is doing?
Woo hoo! The TAP Beta training started today and we have about 60 customers and partners in town for this event, most of whom are in our TAP or ISV programs. I think they are interested in the presentations, judging by the number of questions our presenters are getting.
I'm having that internal PM conflict of wanting to stay on schedule but wanting people to get their questions answered. Since our customers don't get a lot of opportunities to ask their questions directly, I'm definitely veering towards letting people ask questions. I can juggle the schedule a bit to make sure all the content gets covered.
The most challenging thing for me has been sorting out issues with the demo system and AV. Speech Server is a complicated beast for demos - you need to have sound working, and hooked into the room speakers. For phone demos, the phone needs to be able to take input from the speaker's mic, so that you can hear the phone responses over the speakers. We have some super-fancy device called a Gentner (sp?) that makes this all work, but it's very touchy. It suddenly stopped working today (unfortunately we found out during a demo) and we had to scramble to get it fixed. But Microsoft AV came to the rescue and fixed it. So hopefully it'll be fine for tomorrow as well.
I was looking for a demo app I could use to test out whether we could do IVR demos. Then I realized I had a perfect example I could use - the Microsoft operator. When you dial the main Microsoft number (425-882-8080) you get our in-house autoattendant, which is a Speech Server application. So that worked as a perfect test of our AV system!
So, if you're here at the training this week, what do you think?
No one likes a stale blog, so I'm sitting in my kitchen at 8pm with a glass of wine trying to find inspiration. Fortunately, this time it's not too difficult. On Monday we issued a Press Release announcing the availability of our Beta. It reveals some of our very cool new features: the grammar design and tuning advisors, conversational understanding, and the dialog workflow designer, all of which are designed to make building good voice response applications easier and faster.
And if that wasn't exciting enough, three of my TAP customers participated in a Q&A session with Microsoft PressPass - thanks guys! We even got a special place on the PressPass home page, under Highlights. Woo hoo! Since we're a small product team at Microsoft, compared to giants like Windows and Exchange, I am really excited to see Speech Server emphasized like that. We were also featured prominently on our internal website under "Headline News".
I'm crazy busy planning for the TAP training event next week. The nice thing is that I'm very focused - everything that doesn't have to do with the event is getting filed into a folder called "AfterTraining", for me to deal with later. I've been checking off items on my To-Do list like a madwoman, and it's very satisfying. Yeah, I'm that geeky.
After the training, I'm planning to take a few days off for a road trip down to the Bay Area to see some old friends, some from college, and some who I used to work with at Deloitte Consulting.
In September, I'll have spent the same amount of time at Microsoft as I did at Deloitte (3 years + 10 months). I can't believe it - time has really flown! Which will bring me to a total of nearly 8 years "in the industry". That's crazy. It seems like it wasn't that long ago when I went shopping with my mom to buy "work-appropriate" clothes after spending roughly 18 years in school. Of course, I've now come full circle - Microsoft's dress code is casual (very casual!) so I barely have any official "work clothes" anymore.
I like the corporate world, much better than I ever liked working in the academic world. I spent 4 summers during college and 2 years in grad school doing biochemistry and molecular biology research. I knew I was technically good at running the procedures and writing up and presenting my results, but I didn't have that "spark".
While I was in grad school, I read this quote from Barbara McClintock, 1983 Nobel Prizewinner, about her enthusiasm for her work in genetics - "I couldn’t wait to get into the laboratory in the morning and I just hated sleeping." That quote hit me like lightning. I realized I was supposed to be *excited* about my job, and if I didn't like what I was doing, I needed to find something else to do. So a few months later, I interviewed with several consulting companies, launched myself into a career change and didn't look back.
To this day I don't regret "dropping out" of my Ph.D. program, and the number of "Barbara McClintock" days far outweighs the ones where I don't want to go in. If I had stayed in graduate school, I would probably have gotten my PhD around mid-2002, and would now be completing a post-doctoral fellowship, which would have been yet another step before getting a "real job" in academia or industry. In contrast, I've had a "real job" for 7.5 years now.
I've had some great opportunities at Microsoft in the short time I've been here: traveling to Germany, India, and Singapore; writing large portions of a public whitepaper on the Windows package installer; project-managing the release of that installer, which was used for Windows and other products' hotfixes and other updates; getting to design and run a pre-release customer program for a cool product from scratch; going to see the Foo Fighters with some customers (had to mention that one!). The list goes on. Whew! I guess the wine has made me somewhat sentimental (and wordy, apparently).
So, what's your job like? More "Barbara McClintock days" than "don't wanna go to work" days? Tell me! I want to hear about it.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-05MSS07BetaPR.mspx
More later - now, I need to get dressed for work. But it's pretty neat that the product we've been working on for many months now is no longer a "secret". Your thoughts?
I won't be lame and apologize for not posting more often, because that would probably be the standard preface for every blog entry. (But you know I'm thinking it.)
I went on vacation to Oahu, in Hawaii this month for 10 lovely days. It's the longest vacation I've ever taken with my husband in the 6 years we've been together. We were a little worried about how we'd get along after 10 days on an island with constant togetherness. It was just fine, so I guess that means I married the right guy :).
Since this is my work blog, I try to write about something at least vaguely Speech-related or Microsoft-related. On our way to Hawaii, we missed our connecting flight in Los Angeles thanks to some mechanical problem Alaska Airlines had in Seattle. Unfortunately, that was the last flight to Honolulu that night so we were stuck. Having gone to college in Los Angeles, I love the city. But not the airport area, without a change of clothes or a toothbrush, and no car. (Because nobody walks in LA!)
So at the airport, channeling my previous life as a frequent flier, I got on the phone with American Airlines to ensure we were on the next flight out in the morning. Like most airlines, American has an IVR system. Theirs does speech, and it does it pretty well. It asks for your flight number, confirmation code, and can find your reservation even if you don't know those things, but know the date, time and your destination. Pretty cool. It does go a little overboard on "personality" - the female voice is just a little *too* friendly and apologetic, but I may be oversensitive about this after hearing a few talks on VUI design. But it was really cool to interact with this system, since I work on a product with this technology. After it gathered all my information, and I was on hold for an agent for a few minutes, I was deeply disappointed when the agent asked me for all of it again. I read, or heard somewhere that call center agents do this to buy themselves some time to finish up their notes on the previous call but still reduce hold times. I wonder if this is really true, or they just don't actually get the info from the IVR?
That story wasn't too exciting, but I just like those times when my work life intersects with my regular life. It almost made up for the fact that we spent the night in a sketchy airport hotel, and not the tropical resort we had originally planned. We did squeeze in a trip to In 'N' Out burger, which is conveniently located right near the airport. And that did make the evening better. If you're ever in California, Las Vegas, or Phoenix, definitely check out In N Out. Get a Double Double and ask for your fries "well done". It's the best!
One really cool thing I did this week was attending a meeting where a few feature team PMs and Development Leads were discussing the approach to take on how to solve a specific bug that's important to our TAP customers, involving volume controls. Since I don't own any specific features in the product, I'm not usually at these kinds of meetings, but since it was a customer issue, I was invited this time. Some different ideas for approaching the problem were tossed around and discussed, and a high level solution/decision was made at the end (not at the implementation details level, but just *how* we are going to solve the problem). I'm happy with the decision, and I hope our customers will be as well.
I also started my "Mathematical Principles in Computer Science" class at UW this week. It's really a C++/data structures class with a little bit of math. The first assignment is to build classes for a Sudoku game-solving program. Not too hard, except that we have to do it in pairs. For me, programming has always been a solitary sort of activity. So now I have to figure out how to write a spec/design doc and the code with another person. I suppose splitting up the code will be easy but there's no good way to split up the design doc since the initial problem is pretty small. We've decided to each write up the design and then somehow squish it together to make one document. What I really like about the degree program I'm in is that it seems like it teaches good software engineering practices, not just writing code or learning about tricky algorithms. It's the first programming class where I've had to write a design doc before writing the program, and they both contribute equally to the grade. In addition, for the next assignment, the professor is going to make us use *someone else's* code and design doc to actually write the program to solve the puzzle. Thus teaching us that it's important to design and write code that others can understand. So that's what I'll be spending my weekend on. What about you?