Albatross! : ie7

Upcoming speaking engagements...

cwilso — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:50:00 GMT

Trying to stay ahead of the game, but as usual I'm not very good at publicizing what I'm doing. Next week, I will be a panelist on the panel "The Arrival of Web 2.0: The State of the Union on Browser Technology" at the Web 2.0 Expo O'Reilly conference, along with Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Chris Wetherell of Google, and our moderator, Rael Dornfest the founder and CEO of Values of n, Inc. I'm flying in this Sunday and staying until Tuesday morning, so see if you can catch me around - or check twitter or dodgeball to see where I am.

I'm also speaking and attending the MIX'07 Microsoft conference in Las Vegas at the end of the month. A few of my fellow IE team members will also be there; my talk is entitled: "IE7 Past, Present, and Future".

Phone interview with Jon Udell

cwilso — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:33:00 GMT

Jon Udell called me up a week or two ago and asked me a bunch of questions about web history, IE and the HTML WG. I think it's actually broadly interesting, and for once I don't sound like a third grader on speed. Well, too much.

Check it out.

IE re-downloading background images

cwilso — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:53:00 GMT

Quick post - at the Ajax Experience conference, someone mentioned to me that IE was downloading background images multiple times if they were referenced in the stylesheets multiple times. I checked with the team, and they confirmed that they did address this problem in IE7, and it should be fixed (they tried reproducing it multiple different ways to be sure). Unfortunately, I forgot to get the name of the person who mentioned this to me - so if you're out there, this is fixed, and thanks for the feedback.

-C

I'm leaving my position as IE platform Group Program Manager…

cwilso — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:06:00 GMT

…HA! Gotcha!

I’ve been juggling multiple roles on the IE team for a while. With the release of IE7, I decided (with my management’s support, of course) to focus my energy on the design of the IE web developer platform as the lead platform architect, rather than managing the platform program management team as group program manager. This means I won’t have anyone reporting to me, but will oversee the design of the entire IE platform from the perspective of web developers.

Obviously (since I chose it) I’m excited by this opportunity; I’ll have more time to focus on the big picture of our platform and how the pieces fit together. I’m going to be sad not to manage people for a while, since I really enjoy helping my teammates develop their careers (though of course I will continue to do this through mentoring). However, I’m very pleased that my cohort Doug Stamper will be taking over the management of the core of the IE platform program management. Doug and I have worked together for a couple of years now, and there’s no one I could be more comfortable working with or to whom I would be more confident handing over my people management responsibilities.

Note that this is a bit different job than the usual Microsoft “Software Architect” position – I'm focusing on designing the platform that web devs use on IE, not designing our own codebase. I will remain in the Program Management team, and though I expect I’ll be poking my nose in the code more often to understand some things better, I won’t be directly responsible for coding duties – we have a couple of great Software Architects and a great dev team who are much better at that than I am. I’m still working out exactly what this position will mean, of course. (For the curious, this isn't a promotion or a demotion - in fact, I don't know (or much care) if my official title will change or not, either.)

So rest assured – this doesn’t mean you’ll see less of me, or that I will have less of an effect on the IE team as a whole – likely quite the opposite. I will continue to speak publicly, and hopefully will get to blog more often, etc.

-Chris

Not even time to catch my breath...

cwilso — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 02:26:00 GMT

...but I wanted to mention that I'm speaking next week at the Ajax Experience conference - both my usual IE7 talk (although updated a little - did you notice we shipped? :) ) and a keynote talk entitled "The Once and Future Web".

Oh, and I just dumped a bunch of pictures on Flickr, including a few from Fundamentos Web 2006.