Chris Flaat's WebLog : Fluff

Too little sleep, too much caffeine

cflaat — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:52:00 GMT

It seems like forever since I got eight hours of decent sleep. I love my kids, but it sure would be nice if they would sleep past 6am! My wife is on me for drinking too much pop -- she thinks 4 a day is too many (if only she knew it was more like 5 or 6!). I figure Diet Coke and Diet Mountain Dew can't be that harmful -- if aspartame was toxic, I'd be long gone by now.

I feel like a tame version of the characters from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", a caffeine-powered zombie ("I was halfway down the 5th floor corridor when the caffeine took hold..."). And there's the head cold too -- a stuffed-up head and on the verge of losing my voice. Am I sick because I'm tired, or am I tired because I'm sick? Or is it a vicious cycle, with one reinforcing the other?

Must focus...must pull together...must get back to work.

Farewell for now...

Chris

VS Core video on MSDN Channel 9

cflaat — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:15:00 GMT

If you want to see what some of us VS Core and MSBuild folks look like in person, there's now a Channel 9 video of many of us. We each give a brief blurb on what we do.

It's about 42min in length, so if you want to be able to skip around, here's how to download the (130MB) file to your machine:

Go here
You'll see a link called "[Save]"; right-click on this and click "Save target As"
Save it to your machine; the download will take a few minutes (unless you have dial-up, in which case it would take a few days)

Dan, Rajeev and I all work on MSBuild and are together. Dan starts at about 32:40, Rajeev is at 37:05, and I'm at about 39:30.

I guess next time I'm going to look more at the camera so it's just not the side of my head!

Take care,

Chris

New version of Sid Meier's "Pirates!" is a winner

cflaat — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:49:00 GMT

Well, I got the game Pirates! for Christmas, and I have to say it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. I was an addict of the original version back in the 80’s, and so I had high hopes for it. It doesn’t disappoint – it has many great components that make it a super game. Why can’t all games be this good??

The only part of the game that is somewhat unfortunate is that the whole side game of meeting and impressing the governor’s daughters clearly assigns a value to them based solely on their appearance. They go from “plain” to “attractive” to “beautiful” and it’s correspondingly harder to go to the ball with them based on this. I suppose it could be argued that this parallels sociological reality, but it’s still a rather unfortunate message. Of course, I’m sure that the vast majority of the people playing this game are male, so probably very few people will take note of it.

In any case, the game is absolutely fantastic in terms of gameplay and I would highly recommend it. The graphics and sound are also great, but they purely complement the gameplay rather than stealing the limelight.

So, I can blame Sid Meier for another night of less than 8 hours’ sleep! (It’s his fault that I couldn’t stop playing when I should have! Really!)

Take care,

Chris

Come join the MSBuild team!!

cflaat — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 20:04:00 GMT

MSBuild is one of the coolest technologies in Microsoft's Developer Division, and it also happens to be what I work on! We have a job opening for a Software Design Engineer, and are looking for world-class candidates. Here are some of the things we do on the MSBuild dev team:

Love our customers
Write C# code
Drive internal & external adoption of MSBuild
Embrace crazy ideas like test-driven development, Scrum, and giving the world a better build system

We're looking for people with passion for customers & software, significant industry experience, and eligibility to work in the USA. See the job description for more details.

If you're interested & qualified, drop me a line.

Chris

Headhunters on the prowl

cflaat — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 18:58:00 GMT

I am so jazzed...I've been at Microsoft for 11 years, often prowling public places with my MSFT account, and yet until today I've never had an outside recruiter come after me. But, my drought is finally up. "Barbara" (do they use aliases, I wonder?) called and say she had an opportunity I'd be interested in. My stock must be rising! (I wish MSFT would too, but that's another story...)

What would have been really cool is if it had been a couple months ago and I could have forwarded that voicemail to my boss right before my review #'s were determined. I wonder if that would be considered a dirty trick!

Barbara -- if you're out there, I'm flattered, but I'm afraid I'm way too addicted to my job here to consider leaving. Call me 2010 and if things are any different then maybe I'll call you back!

Chris

Back from the brink

cflaat — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 18:40:00 GMT

Jimmy Buffet: "...like a man just released from indenture"

Supertramp: "...like a ship without an anchor...like a slave without a chain..."

Frank N. Furter: "I'm going home"

OK, it's not quite as extreme as the legendary Transylvanian's final trip home, but it sometimes feels that way (but with a happier ending of course). I'm back, having served my management tour of duty. What I thought would be 2 or 3 months of transtion duty turned into eight months of managing a team of 40 in a highly visible product unit within a highly visible division. Pure management work is just not fun for me. It's mostly political wrangling and process management that's far removed from delivery of anything useful. This is in stark contrast to my permanent job, where I feel like we're dealing with important and interesting technical decisions on a regular basis and I can actually add value. (Plus, I can spend a few hours a week actually writing code, which is a thousand times more interesting than anything I did as interim dev manager.)

Actually it was mostly finished up at the end of July, but it's taken me a good month to get back into the swing of my permanent job, which is being the dev lead for the MSBuild team (which is, fortunately, a team so strong that things continued to go fine in my virtual absence in the dev lead position).

Learn from my experience: if you have a job you like, don't take a job that makes work feel like work, even if it has more perceived glamor or prestige. It's not worth it!!

Now that I'm back to my normal job, I intend to recommit myself to this blog, and I'll even try to post interesting technical stuff too from time to time.

Chris

Back from Easter Island and Chile

cflaat — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 00:07:00 GMT

I had a great time on Easter Island. The pics are here. I'm having trouble getting Easter Island out of my head -- more than any other place I've visited overseas, it calls me to return.

Take care! -Chris

Hello from ASP.NET!!

cflaat — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 00:06:00 GMT

Greetings all -

We've been moved (not voluntarily, I might add) to this new blog server. So far it looks like this a nicer system. Hopefully my old content will get moved over soon so that this blog isn't split up.

Thanks for reading!

Chris

My blog is moving

cflaat — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Readers -

Please be advised that my blog is moving to http://weblogs.asp.net/cflaat (but I don't have any content there yet). See you there soon.

Chris

Management tour of duty

cflaat — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 02:14:00 GMT

Greetings, all! My apologies again for doing such a bad job of keeping you up to date. I have been absorbed with my duties as interim development manager for our team, and have not had much time to delve into the various technical things going on in the areas I’m still nominally dev lead for. (Fortunately, I have great sub-leads that I can delegate most things to.)

My stint as interim dev manager has been an interesting one. I’ve learned more about how decisions get made, how offices get assigned, and how things work at the divisional level. I even got a tour of the vault where we have all the secrets of bug-free software and cold fusion. (They wouldn’t, however, let me see Bill Gates’s rumored 30-foot replica of the Great Pyramid made of solid gold bars – I guess you have to make Vice President before you get to see that…)

My current challenge is trying to bring Whidbey coding to a close, balancing the pressures of feature requests, bug fixing, resources, and time pressure. We are also embarking on some incredibly cool long-term efforts, which of course have to be balanced with more short-term needs. It’s kind of funny, because with all the money we have in the bank you’d think it wouldn’t be a problem for each team to get a few extra people here & there whenever a need arose. However, having all that money doesn’t mean we don’t need to be efficient and profitable (since all shareholders, which many employees also are, want to see the stock go up).

Recruiting has been interesting. I’ve long done interviewing for Microsoft, and am pretty familiar with it. But trying to fill multiple open spots within a team is a real challenge. I have one position, development lead for source control integration and SourceSafe, that oversees some really interesting areas but I haven’t yet been able to fill. It’s a real paradox that when I write a blog entry that has anything to do with source code control, I get tons of comments & feedback, but when I post a job looking for world-class candidates to lead development of this area, I don’t hear much back – and this when tech jobs in the US are said to be disappearing by the thousands every yet. I consider myself fairly well-read and current on economic and technical trends, but I cannot figure out this contradiction! If you’re qualified for and interested in this position, send me e-mail.

One interesting thing has been that of “politics”, which someone at a dev manager is supposed to deal with a lot. Interestingly, there really hasn’t been any of the political stuff I expected – there’s no one person that you need to be afraid of or suck up to. Instead, I’ve found that it’s simply a challenge getting multiple organizations to agree on anything, especially when they are driven by different pressures. Then when you add that certain individuals are stubborn (or downright annoying), that’s when you start to get frustrated and feel like things are “political”. But I’ve found that if you argue your case loudly & long enough, you can actually make things change. So I’ve actually found this process-intensive and technically-hands-off position more of an interesting challenge than I expected.

Thanks for stopping by! -Chris

Disclaimer: There is some intended humor in the above blog entry. There is really no vault with the secrets of bug-free software or cold fusion, and there’s no 30-foot solid gold pyramid.

Career crossroads

cflaat — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 01:18:00 GMT

Greetings all –

My apologies for being a bit out of touch for the last few weeks. There have been several “fires” burning that I’ve had to deal with, plus a short vacation for my 10-year college reunion a couple weeks ago. And now, my manager has been promoted to a different position inside MSFT and I’ve been asked to be interim development manager for our team (which is about 40 developers) until a permanent replacement is found. I agreed, but not without some ambivalence. My current team is 11 people, so I still get to do a lot of technical things, but in my interim role managing a team of 40, I’ll be a full-time bureaucrat for the next couple of months. Meetings, process, people issues, needing to deal with cross-group wrangling, etc. The kind of thing a technical person least wants to deal with.

It’s been an interesting little adventure so far. When the news got out that I would be doing this stint, a lot of people would hit me “the question”: Do I want the job permanently? Now, this is a question I would only hit someone with if I knew them fairly well, but maybe I’m a bit on the reserved side. So, since everyone keeps asking me this question, I might as well tell the world the answer: I don’t know!

The big downside of going into the bureaucracy business would be that I’d have to delegate away all the really interesting technical tasks, which I do enjoy. On the other hand, going up one level in the hierarchy would give me more influence and much better enable me to make some improvements to our internal development processes that I’ve been wanting to make. I guess it’s mostly a matter of how I want to influence things, and on what kinds of tasks I want to spend my day.

Of course, this is probably an irrelevant question with respect to my boss’s job: it certainly hasn’t been offered to me permanently, and probably won’t be anyway. But whatever happens, I will have a fun time doing, essentially, a “dev manager internship” and maybe I’ll get some insight into where I want to go during the second decade of my career (wow, do I feel old when I look at it that way!).

While I’m in this interim role, I plan to continue my blog, although I may expand it to address some VS IDE features beyond VS solutions & projects.

Well, that’s all for now! -Chris

Have to recommend "Whale Rider"

cflaat — Mon, 22 Sep 2003 21:45:00 GMT

So, I saw the movie Whale Rider this weekend, and I have to say it's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Reading a synopsis of the film you wouldn't think much of it, but it really grabs you. The girl who plays the lead role does an amazing job, and the rest of the cast is superb as well. If you get a chance to see it while it's in theaters, do -- otherwise, rent it when it comes out on video. -Chris

Software patents

cflaat — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 19:15:00 GMT

Greetings, all! It looks like the Europeans came to their senses and rejected American-style software patents. See here for a ZDNet article on this. There was a recent article in the Economist discussing the EU’s consideration of software patents, which got to the point much better than other articles I’ve read.

And before I write any more, I should emphasize that what I’m about to say are my own personal opinions and do not reflect Microsoft’s opinions or policies.

The Europeans made the right choice to avoid going down the route of the US . America ’s patent system is way too generous regarding software patents (and this comes from someone who has a patent, albeit a highly obscure one that I barely remember now). There have been some particularly bad cases of software patents that went too far (see here for a typical anti-software-patent site on the web that gives lots of examples of frivolous and over-broad patents).

The central fact with most technological innovation is that you need to build on the accomplishments of those who went before you. In the field of physics, Einstein needed the work of people like Newton , Riemann, and Lorentz to formulate Special and General Relativity. In the field of computer science, machine language, assembly language, and Fortran had to come before more refined high-level programming languages could be understood and formulated. And in the software field, things change so quickly that a concept which is innovative one year can be commonplace and ubiquitous a few years later (consider the WWW itself or more recently, weblogs). Furthermore, software is different from many fields in that key innovations need to be broadly shared and incorporated into programs so that software can collectively improve. Society can’t move forward if some of these key building blocks are considered the patented property of a few.

I do think patents have their place. Drugs, for example, are a classic case where it makes sense to reward big companies for the monumental investments needed to develop a drug, and where it doesn’t hold back progress to allow that company exclusive rights to that drug. (With the exception of scenarios where a drug is needed in order to address a medical epidemic and monetary considerations need to be temporarily suspended.)

People say that patents tend to favor big companies, and that may be true. But I would guess that patents are mostly used against big companies, too. Bubba’s Software might be at risk of infringing on a patent from IBM, but is IBM going to care? On the other hand, if Bubba’s Software has a patent that IBM may be infringing on, you can be sure Bubba’s going to get himself an ambulance chasing lawyer and try to soak Big Blue for all he can.

I recall several recent cases where Microsoft was alleged to have infringed upon a patent from some obscure company. But you don’t read of many cases where Microsoft has gone after some tiny company for patent infringement.

For devs on the frontline at Microsoft, as with anywhere else, patents are a huge pain. When implementing a feature, you have to worry about whether you’re infringing on a patent. (And how the @$#% are you supposed to know that an algorithm which you and a couple other people sketched out on a board was filed as a patent by some obscure Japanese company three years ago?? Have your lawyers do a patent search for every nontrivial function in your program??)

Here’s a possibility. Maybe what we need is to define a head of time a set of unsolved programming problems which, if solved, would be granted patents. Some possibilities might be a cryptographic algorithm with certain properties, an e-mail system that is cheap, efficient, and spam-proof, a way of breaking the current prime number factoring limit, a 99.999% effective speech recognition program, etc. If someone could solve such a problem, we’d grant them a patent for some reasonable period of time (say, 5 years). The benefits of revolutionary progress would compensate for the years where the one company had a lock on the technology.

In any case, I hope we can fix the patent law in the US to severely restrict the issuance of software patents. As the law currently stands, I believe they are doing more economic and technological harm than good.

[This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.]

I exist!!!

cflaat — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 00:19:00 GMT

So, the July stats for the GotDotNet blog pages came out, and I actually showed up with a statistically significant number of hits! I started my blog in late June, and I had so few hits in June that I didn't even show up in the June report (kind of demoralizing). But for July I got over a thousand separate visits at my main page (and many more RSS listeners).

So far I've received a handful of blog comments and 0 (yes, zero) direct e-mails. I had actually considered giving some fake alias to defend against a storm of random e-mails from people asking me to debug their apps for them (this used to happen when I posted on Usenet with my microsoft.com address). But blog readers are obviously a more sophisticated lot!

(Knowing that someone is listening is important to us bloggers -- it give us good motivation to keep at it!)

Thanks to all those who are tuning in! -Chris

Easter Eggs & Credit Screens: good or bad?

cflaat — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 02:05:00 GMT

Greetings, all. So...I was re-reading (well, actually re-skimming) Pete McBreen's book Software Craftsmanship, which I think has a lot of interesting observations.

One of the things he calls for is a return to the practice of letting software teams insert their names into the product. Some products, especially games, still do this, often through the About Box or some other fairly visible location. At Microsoft, these would often be hidden in the product, to be unleashed only with a secret keystroke or other special sequence. The motivation behind this is to increase each contributor's personal attachment to the product, both giving them personal credit and also publicly linking their reputation to that of the product.

A few years back, Microsoft's upper management banned Easter Eggs, apparently because customers such as governments were (understandably) displeased at the thought of secret code, presumably poorly tested, being inserted into software they were purchasing.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the banning of Easter Eggs seems to have also banned credit screens in Microsoft products. Certainly it should be harmless to list contributors' names in a non-secret place such as the help documentation, a screen off the About Box, or somewhere on the web and avoid the disadvantages of'secret code paths.

Personally, I like McBreen's arguments about why contributors' names should be attached to software. If your reputation is on the line, you're more likely to go the extra mile. Plus, if you see a product you like then it's easy to find out who was behind it, as you can do today in the film industry.

What do you think?

-Chris