A View from Elsewhere : First Use Development

Maker Faire and Popfly Results

johnmont — Thu, 31 May 2007 07:12:00 GMT

Well, we saw a lot of people at Maker Faire, but the biggest thing we did was the ducks. Sure we gave a lot of demos, but for every demo we gave we had four kids painting ducks. Here are some of the ducks that the kids painted, Popfly-style.

Twitter + Virtual Earth in Popfly

johnmont — Sat, 19 May 2007 00:36:00 GMT

Popfly Humor

johnmont — Sat, 19 May 2007 00:32:50 GMT

Drew Bollman has posted his mashup wish list. He had me at #1.

Maker Faire: Meet the Popfly Team

johnmont — Fri, 18 May 2007 23:58:52 GMT

Tonight a lot of my team and I head down to San Mateo, CA for O'Reilly's Maker Faire. I've never been and am pretty excited to see what people are up to -- things like the Fab@Home look neat. We'll be in the Microsoft Coding4Fun booth giving demos of Popfly and painting rubber ducks.

Welcome to Popfly

johnmont — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:47:00 GMT

Today (that'd be Friday) we're announcing Microsoft Popfly(tm), which is the project my team has been working on. It's a simple, web-based tool that makes it easy to create mashups, web pages, and so on. We also have a Visual Studio 2005 package that enables you to connect VS to Popfly.

This is a simple example of a Popfly creation: it's a mashup between the pictures of cats from Flickr, and our "Whack-a-Mole" block.

Do People Want to Tweak?

johnmont — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:56:00 GMT

I believe that people want the ability to control their digital experiences – not just setting backgrounds or uploading photos, but the ability to completely change any aspect of any product or website they use and reconfigure them at will. In other words, I believe that people fundamentally want to tweak their computers and the web sites they visit to make them work better or look better or just be different from what everyone else has.

When I talk about the idea that people want to personalize their digital experiences, I often get blank looks. "Not everyone wants that," goes one line of reply. "Most people want things to just work – like a TV: you turn it on and leave it alone." It’s epitomized by this post on Macs vs. PCs.

Alan Kay is credited with the quote, "Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." Einstein with the quote that "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."

The idea I have for enabling people to control their digital experiences -- to create truly personal experiences that they can share or not at will -- is one that seems to give a lot of people a hard time. They assume control = complexity. I don't know that it does. I think you can have both.

So what are some examples of simplicity+control that I can learn from?

Sir Ken Robinson on Education

johnmont — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:44:57 GMT

My boss sent this my way a couple of days ago. I put off looking at it since it seemed like it would be work-related and we all know that in the weeks preceding and following Christmas It Is Forbidden to Do Work. In any event I watched it today and finally characterized it as a 30-minute standup routine with about six brilliant ideas in it. This was the most palatable presentation of a deeply though-out call to rethink education that I've ever seen.

RTB Finished

johnmont — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:09:55 GMT

One of the meetings that our division ~~inflicts~~ regularly schedules is called "running the business" (formerly they were called "rhythm of the business" but I think someone noticed that we don't got rhythm). Our team had its RTB meeting today. It went well, with Adam Nathan delivering a stellar demo and Paramesh (my PUM) delivering a stellar slide deck. For my part, I delivered some stellar one-liners. (Everyone has to add value in their own way.)

Now, with one set of questions answered and yet another set to answer, we can proceed into the new calendar year.

Power Outage

johnmont — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:40:51 GMT

This morning, building 41 lost power. Steven Wilssens (one of the PMs on my team) and I were just settling into some deep conversation when everything went black and the fire alarm started whooping and periodically saying, "Lobby, lobby, lobby" in an awful mechanical voice. So we all adjourned to the Building 26 cafeteria for electricity and food.

Of course what makes this horrid is that we have a VP demo at 2:30 and lost 90 minutes of valuable prep time, leaving Adam (our dev and demo god) a bit stressed.

Calculating Operational Costs

johnmont — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:24:05 GMT

One of my tasks over the weekend was to calculate how much it would cost to operate a service. I can't tell you what the service is, of course, since actually providing useful context is far beyond the scope of this blog. ;-) However, I had a good sit-down with Excel 12 on Saturday morning and began refactoring the way I think into things like "hardware" and "unanticipated downtime." I was struck by a few things:

Excel 12's table autoformat feature doesn't work the way I do; this caused me no end of grief and my tables still look weird.
People say "hardware is cheap," and maybe it is, but it sure adds up. Sure other costs eventually outweigh hardware, but good quality rack-mounted web servers are still expensive, especially when you're buying double to allow for full redundancy.
You don't have to allow for full redundancy. I don't know where the breakeven point is exactly, but 100% redundancy isn't really necessary.
The service time to replace a hard drive will cost more than the hard drive itself.
Most people don't know how much it costs to operate their sites. With the exception of some of the big sites, which know to-the-penny how much things costs, most of the site operators I've spoken with (even for sites with millions of unique users) only know a rough annual approximation of hosting costs, and even then don't account for everything.

I'd love to say that I now have a spreadsheet that captures every variable and gives phenomenally accurate predictions of cost. Instead I have a spreadsheet that takes about 6 variables and calculates an annual operating cost for a particular kind of site. Interesting, but not the panacea I'd hoped for.

US Imagine Cup: Not Just Algorithms

johnmont — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:42:06 GMT

One of the largest challenges facing CS students is the transition from being a CS student to writing production code in a work environment for a living. Historically programming challenges have focused more on CS-student-oriented work, but this year the Imagine Cup in the US is broadening out.

Students will be given a spec and told to implement it. When they are done, they will submit their DLL to an engine created by my old friend Ed Kaim's company, which will then run it through a battery of NUnit unit tests and award points based on the functionality, reliability, and performance. This process will culminate with a week in Redmond where the top competitors are placed in teams and duke it out by implementing a real-world solution.

Information about the contest is here, and about the Imagine Cup in general is here.

Doing the Happy Dance

johnmont — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:59:35 GMT

After a review with SomaSe last week in which we demoed what I'll just call "our stuff" (though the credit belongs to Adam Nathan, who really needs to update his blog), we went yesterday to present to Bob Muglia. The last time I presented to Bob in any way, shape, or form, I was a director of marketing and the conversation was about branding. This time, the conversation was about technology and opportunity and truthfully, up to about five minutes into the meeting I didn't know what Bob was going to say. He kept looking at the projection screen where Adam was setting up to do the demo and I kept saying, "Pay no attention to what's on the screen. We'll get to that." But by about the third bullet on the first slide, we had him. I often forget how folks like Bob come alive when they're presented with an interesting problem space, but Bob got precisely what we were talking about incredibly quickly. By the time we got to the demo, it was ours to lose and Adam pulled a few rabbits out of his hat (adding features that weren't there the night before) and by the end, Bob was asking, "How did you do that? Can you do this? When can you launch?"

In the grand scheme of things, a good exec review isn't like solving world hunger, but getting positive feedback on your work always feels good, especially when you're a small startup team that seems to be challenging a lot of conventional wisdom.

Next up: more VPs and some customer councils to get feedback.

Safari's Development Playground

johnmont — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:51:10 GMT

As part of my team's work we bought a Mac for testing. Setting aside how cute that little box is and how interesting it's been to get it to work on the Microsoft network (bone up on your IPSEC, please), we've been trying to get Safari to work and have found that, unlike Firefox and IE, Safari often behaves very strangely. Some querying around among people who know and a conversation with the principal architect at another company told me that many people seem to have problems making their AJAX sites work with Safari. A further query found that http://webkit.org is evidently the development ground for what becomes Safari, and poking around on that site and found that http://webkit.org/projects/compat/hitlist.html had a variety of AJAX-related issues (live.com is heavily AJAX-based) as the biggest compatibility hit list items, along with a set of bugs like http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6519 that indicated that these were P2 bugs of severity “major.” Granted, they're not P1 showstopper bugs, but it's very cool to be able to see the work that's going on.

Job Descriptions

johnmont — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:03:00 GMT

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.

Here’s one. What would make it better?

Software Development Engineer

10 PRINT "This is way cool"

20 GOTO 10

Does this look like your first program? At any given time, there are about 25 million people going through the same thing. The Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT) is a startup team focused on building a set of tools for these customers. Our team has a simple charter: create a wave of hobbyist and student developers using Microsoft technologies by making programming fun, rewarding and cool.

We’re creating a next-generation development experience for hobbyists, students, and novices – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. This means exploring new UI paradigms, leveraging the latest advances in programming languages, and creating a collection of domain-specific frameworks and libraries that make it easy to create cool experiences with animations and rich graphics that cross online and offline scenarios as well as different devices, browsers, and applications.

We’re a small team with minimal process overhead committed to steering clear of big oil tankers and to shipping software quickly. In fact, we’re driving to ship something once a week to keep the community buzz going, which means we need to get much smarter about how we design, build, and test software. Come help make us smarter.

This startup team needs a smart, customer-focused developer to create a range of solutions and experiences, and to enable us to become the most nimbly shipping product both on-cycle and off-cycle.

The candidate must have a have a BS or MS, and at least 5 years of commercial software programming in C or C++. The candidate needs a working knowledge of C#, Javascript, and ASP.NET. You will also need strong communication skills and the ability to effectively manage cross-group relationships. There’s lots of room for growth in this startup team, so get on board early.

Amaze Me 2

johnmont — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:32:00 GMT

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 calculate the most efficient routes from any address to any other address. As data sets, you have all the bus timetables and their route maps, plus the input of starting time or finishing time, starting address, and ending address. Build an application that will show you the bus routes and schedules and overlay them onto a map.

This is a real app, by the way, only the Seattle one just gives you text as output.

I was thinking through this problem the other day and realized just how complicated it could be.