A View from Elsewhere : Tuscany

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.

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.

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.

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.

NPT Team Charter

johnmont — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:31:00 GMT

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 the momentum of the current Visual Studio Express products. With nearly 5 million downloads, and 600,000 unique registrants, these products have become more popular than we ever anticipated. Our first goal is to deliver an amazing release with the “Orcas” wave of Visual Studio by working with the partner teams and building some amazing content to surround the Express products.
The next task is to create a strong community of non-professional developers. There are around 27 million of them, so that’s no easy task. We’ll start by building on existing developer communities – both Microsoft and non-Microsoft – to create a strong network of communities, but our goal is to create a community phenomenon more like Myspace, YouTube, or Flickr – a place where people go to share and have fun. Creating this community is going to drive us to create a set of services for storing and sharing source code, ratings, comments, and for buying and selling software.
Finally, we see the need for a new kind of development experience for this customer – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. We want to reach out to novices and intermediate hobbyist developers with support for the programming languages they already know. We want to offer a host 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.

It’s a pretty broad charter, but I think we can deliver on it. In fact, based on some of the prototypes we have already, I know we can.

Non-Pro Tools Team PUM

johnmont — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:03:00 GMT

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 excited. I’ve worked with Paramesh before as his marketing team for Visual J#, Visual Studio Tools for Devices, and even for things like the Object Test Bench. He’s an incredibly nice person and pretty on the ball (I mean, for management ;-).

I still have a couple of months to play before management arrives – he starts September 1^st – but I’m very happy to have a full time manager.

Boy, I never thought I’d say that.

What We’re Doing: Cool Tools

johnmont — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:32:00 GMT

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, teaching them along the way about things like methods, classes, events, properties, loops, and conditionals. It sounds boring, but the implementation he’s come up with is pretty amazing – awesome to look at and really amazingly easy to use. I’m hoping that we get it to a point where we can post it publicly pretty soon so we can show some of the thinking we’ve been doing, but for right now we’re heads down on getting it to a point where it satisfies our core scenarios.

Adam Nathan Joins Non-Pro Tools Team

johnmont — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:59:00 GMT

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 Adam was the right guy when, on the weekend between leaving his former team and joining the NPT team, he wrote a prototype IDE based on a casual conversation we had. Basically, I said something offhand and about three days later he had it running, “Just to see if I could do it.”

We’ve been building on it ever since.

We Have a Name: NPT

johnmont — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 16:36:00 GMT

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 working on tools for hobbyists and novices and still working on creating some services. Only the name has changed.

After HTML and Javascript, C++

johnmont — Fri, 26 May 2006 00:58:00 GMT

Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.). This based on some of our internal research over the past 4 years (statistically significant sample, but US-only). I would have expected VB or maybe a dynamic language. Or even C (which showed up much farther down the list).

Well, at least it surprised *me*.

Dumb Idea Nipped in the Bud: Film at 11

johnmont — Tue, 23 May 2006 16:04:00 GMT

Have you ever sat down and thought up some brilliant thing, then realized, “Why bother?” Today during an interview, a candidate related a question he was asked about how he’d implement a particular feature. To me, the feature (it’s not important what the feature was) sounded cool – just the kind of thing that Tuscany should take on. But the candidate’s first question was, “Why bother?” He had a solid defense of why the feature was basically silly if not stupid. Sexy, yes. But also silly.

I mean, who really need an operating system with integrated GUI?

(Just kidding about that last part.)

How Did You Learn to Program?

johnmont — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:01:00 GMT

How did you learn to program? Especially if you’re not a professional developer and never had been (I already have the data that says that something like 70% of professional developers got degrees in computer science or engineering). I’m wondering how you learned to program if you aren’t a pro.

What programming language did you start with? C? BASIC? VB? C#? PHP? HTML? What was your next language?

This is a question that’s occupying a large amount of my time these days. Why? Because, as in any resource-constrained environment, I need to focus on doing things in order – preferably in the order of “biggest thing” to “smallest thing.” In this case, I’m confronted with a host of solutions to how people learn:

Books (and if through a book, what kind of book – intro book like this) or a book like K-R C?)
Online videos (like this)
Online “lab” (like this)
Online tutorial (like TryRuby)
Classroom

And if you use one of these, what did you find most useful? What was fun? What was boring? What got you sucked in in the first place?

Fundamentally, I’m asking where my team should invest its efforts in getting future developers from 0-10 MPH.

Who's the Customer?

johnmont — Tue, 02 May 2006 17:50:00 GMT

Who is the target user for our non-professional tools? In order to make smarter decisions about what we build, we need to understand that the customer we’re building this product for doesn’t fit a single profile. Off the top of my head, I can think of five personas/stereotypes:

“Jay,” the professional developer by day and hobbyist by night who may spend time helping friends build their Web sites or work on a game he hopes to sell online.
“Moira,” the middle-school student who has a high aptitude for math and science and is interested in learning to program but doesn’t have a set curriculum in school.
“Trevor,” the middle-aged accountant who’s a whiz at Excel macros and wants to learn more both as a hobby and maybe to help at work.
“Alexa,” the CS student in college who has a full course load but is also interested in building applications and Web sites both as a demonstration of skills and to learn.
“Heloise,” the system administrator who is interested in learning how to customize Windows to help at work.

Given ten more minutes, I could come up with another half dozen.

This is important because today’s Express products service all these customers. The general appeal of Express has helped boost the download numbers, but at some point it will start to pull the product apart as we have to decide which customer we’re aiming for – the professional LAMP developer, the computer science student using C++, or the hobbyist interested in building games.