Justin Smith's Blog : About Justin

First week at the new job

justinjsmith — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:01:50 GMT

This week I started a new job at Microsoft - I've moved from Developer and Platform Evangelism to the Connected Systems Division. I'm now a program manager on the BizTalk Services team (http://biztalk.net). It was hard to leave DPE, but this seems like the right opportunity. For those that haven't seen BizTalk.net, it's an incubation project for messaging, security, and workflow services that run at scale in Microsoft's hosted environment.

The week was a whirlwind, and I am having a blast. The team is very agile, and it has the atmosphere of a startup. Truly cool.

What's a Cybertopian?

justinjsmith — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:00:13 GMT

If you do a web search on the term, you may find definitions that are less than flattering. That was certainly not my intention when naming this blog. I got the term from an interesting book I read a while back titled "Electric Dreams" (by Ted Friedman). If you like thinking about how computers fit into society, this book is a great read. You can find it here, and the author's website/blog here.

Cybertopian is not a word you'll find in the English dictionary, and there doesn't seem to be consensus about it on the web. I think a Cybertopian is someone who believes that computers and the free flow of information can change the world for the better. There are certainly negative consequences to the free flow of information and technology, and we probably cannot measure whether or not there is a net gain to society. Given what I do for a living, I choose to believe that there is a net gain. My definition is the one I choose to accept in regards to this blog.

Working closely to the technology (WCF) that enables information to flow more freely is certainly inline with these beliefs. It's definitely an interesting time to work with web services...

On a personal note

justinjsmith — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:31:21 GMT

I'm not one to make this blog a place for personal posts, but I have to make an exception today. Matt Winkler and I have been in Australia and New Zealand for their respective TechEd conferences. All in all it has been a productive trip.

Yesterday we had some personal time, so Matt and I decided to jump off the Auckland sky tower (with a cable attached). It was 192m up and quite a bit of fun.

Matt uploaded the videos to soapbox.

Here's mine: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=4e39e20c-0558-48d0-8664-f45fd2e6a7ed

Here's Matt's: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=2675fd55-afa9-4623-9a86-de4039207a31

You can skip the first minute or so of both...

Hello World

justinjsmith — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:07:00 GMT

Hi. My name is Justin Smith - I joined Microsoft last week as a Technical Evangelist. My office is in building 18 on the Redmond campus. As shown in this post, I swallowed the red pill.

For the forseeable future, my focus is to help drive the adoption of WCF and and the WCF-related parts of Orcas. Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked as a trainer and consultant for Wintellect. While there, I wrote Inside WCF, as well as Wintellect's WCF Course. The book should be out by 2007 TechEd. Better late than never.

Over time I will be posting content related to WCF and Orcas. Stay tuned because there are tons of cool features in Orcas (and WCF). In my view, many of these are game-changers in the distributed application space.