What the VC++ team does for fun
Last year I got swept into the national craze with Texas Hold 'Em poker. As I was playing various friends and at the casinos, I wondered how many of my C++ teammates enjoyed the game, too. So last fall I set up a No Limit tournament open only to the VC++ team. Almost 25% of the team participated in the tourney and as soon as it was done I had people asking for another go 'round! So last Friday night we started the Spring Edition of the poker tournament. We have ~ %20 turn out this time, which is still pretty good.
Friday we had seven players: SCurrie - a former VC PM who has moved on to the division community team (who are responsible for Betas and the general story for getting our people in touch with you, our customers); Andy Rich, a fellow VC++ blogger (who, by the way, I nagged to post soon); Alex, a tester for the compiler back end; Bruce a developer for the IDE who has also worked on the build story for VC and parts of the toolset; AndyA, one of our compiler back end dev leads; Phil, a famous compiler front end developer who just may be one of the most knowledgable about the entire compiler and runtime, and another player, Dan Spalding, a sorely missed, recently retired developer who was linker god at Microsoft. Bruce brought fresh (still warm!) chocolate chip cookies, and Alex barely made it in time to start :0 We grooved to all kinds of music - from Frank Sinatra to Blondie to the Garden State Soundtrack (I'll leave out the part where they harass me for my music library which contains many fine offerings by Paula Abdul!). Scott and Andy were the last two remaining and now that I think about it I'm not sure who ended up winning. I think Andy had the chip lead when I went upstairs to check on my babysitter, and when I came back down I think they said Scott won. I'm not sure! Since the top two from the table advanced to the final table, I didn't confirm. I'm sure one of them will let me know after I post this :)
After that game, we started a second/consolation tourney with prize money going to the top three. I got to play in this game, but I didn't play for long. On the third or fourth hand Bruce made some big bets and I was just certain he was bluffing, but alas his diamond flush made a fool of fours with an Ace kicker :) I don't recall who went out when in this one, but I do know that Dan was happy to win top prize, leaving a with a bit more money than he arrived with.
april
