A View from Elsewhere

This came up in the context of the development experience we’re working on. One of the objects we supply to work with is a maze – you can create a new maze, take a step in the maze, check to see if the direction you’re facing is a valid move, turn, and...

I was riding the bus into work the other day when I realized that bus route calculations are kind of like the maze problem, only harder. Imagine that you live in a city (e.g. Seattle) and that you use buses to get everywhere and you want to be able to...

We still need a name for the team. Since none of the ideas we came up with previously seemed to pass the internal sniff test (go figure), I decided that I’d opt for naming it descriptively: the Non-Professional Tools Team, or NPT for short. We’re still...

We have our first developer. Adam Nathan has joined us. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the soul behind Pinvoke.net , a community site dedicated to getting good coverage of .NET’s Pinvoke functionality (which he largely wrote). I knew...

I’ve found that writing job descriptions is harder than I thought. In particular, it’s harder because I’m writing for so many audiences: for the internal developers and PMs who might be interested, the external folks, for other managers, and so on. ...

While I’ve been running around creating PPTs and sending email, Adam has been working on a prototype development experience that’s designed to take someone with no knowledge of code through to creating simple Web sites with HTML and Javascript or VBscript...

After about four months of working through some hard problems, I’ve begun to center our team on a few core work areas. Based a lot on the feedback you gave me through this blog, I narrowed it to three work areas: We’re going to start by building on...

We have a PUM. Paramesh Vaidyanathan who ran the India Developer Center for Developer Division – a team of something like 100 people – has decided he wants to come back to the US to run the Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT – our team). I’m incredibly...

Conexxion by Boeing is an in-air 802.11 wireless service. As far as I know, it’s the ín-air 802.11 wireless service. I’ve used it on a couple of SAS flights from Seattle to Europe and, when it works, it’s amazing. Unfortunately, you pay your twenty-something...