James Finnigan : Microsoft

New Beginnings...

jamesfinnigan — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:09:06 GMT

I've moved onto the Windows Experience team. It should a lot of fun to continue to follow Guided Help, and some of my other projects but my emphasis now is on the Windows Experience - things like explorer and the like. I'm also the new owner of the LUA/UAC shell UI, which should be interesting.

This will probably change the kinds of things that I blog about - you can expect more shell-related topics, as well as various user experience discussions.

We have a lot of changes that we're excited about, and I look forward to building on Windows Vista.

Recruiting at BYU

jamesfinnigan — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:35:37 GMT

Hi all - I'm at BYU for the career fair tomorrow (Wednesday). Come on down and talk to us and bring a resume - I met a lot of you at the dinner tonight (thanks for coming) which was great fun. We're also going to be doing some mock technical interviews on Thursday if you're interested and then I'll be back down around the 22nd for the screening interviews.

I'm an SDE and I'm also here with Eric Jarvi (SDET), Rian Sammy Sacquitne (the BYU recruiter), and Ric Lewis (PM). Come by to talk to us about opportunities at Microsoft, what it's like to work at Microsoft, our awesome benefits, whatever. I look forward to meeting you!

James

Microsoft CES website - Group Shot pictures

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:09:25 GMT

Here's Microsoft's CES website. There's a ton of interesting stuff on here. The one that will probably impact me the most is Group Shot. Not that the rest isn't incredibly cool, it's just that I have the groupshot problem a lot. :)

These two images becomes combined (source can be seen bottom left) to look like bottom right. How cool is that for group pictures (particularly those involving small children).

Agile teams at Microsoft?

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 06:54:48 GMT

Well, I was just reading ex-MSFT guy Moishe Lettvin's entry about how the start menu put together. In brief, there was a lot of wasted time in meetings (my interpretation), waiting for code to arrive, thrashing due to dependencies, and not a lot of writing actual code. It sounds like the feature ended up missing the vision, too.

That's got to be a pretty miserable year.

There are big differences between different teams here at Microsoft in terms of culture, process, productivity, etc. Of course there are some shared advantages/pain points, as well. Making Vista has definitely spurred changes to a number of these areas, because there are real issues. Improving the speed with which changes are reflected in the builds is important (although there's a trade-off between things moving quickly and too many changes to investigate to understand a regression - I don't advocate a single branch for a team the size of Windows), and there are a number of process changes underway. These are issues that will affect every team to a varying extent. But there are a lot of other issues as well that individual teams can fix.

I worked on Welcome Center and we had a lot of people interested in what was happening in the feature (execs, etc). But most meetings involved two or three people. And I use the term meeting loosely. Basically, we called each other on the phone (most calls lasted under a minute). Initially, we had two or three meetings with most folks present but there were really only 3 people working on it (all of them part-time). I imagine that our PM had more work to do than I did, because there was a lot more deciding what to do than deciding the best way to do it. It's a pretty simple feature to implement.

So here are two examples of a simple feature: one with tons of overhead, and one that was run more efficiently. Were the features intrinsically different? Were the partner teams unduly burdensome? Something else?

(Yes, this isn't a discussion of Agile adoption at Microsoft, I just mean agile in the general sense)

Photosynth is LIVE!

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:05:42 GMT

I talked about this cool service a little while ago - it's really cool. From the videos, it's really exciting. But even more exciting is that it's now live! Photosynth is a great way to do internet tourism, as well as ... well, it's hard to explain exactly, but one picture can put you back in that place. Great for memories, great to see other pictures that are out there about the same area.