Bit-cycling : Posts about promising to post more

So thing's have been a litle busy...

justsean — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:33:00 GMT

Yeah, that's not quite an excuse for 6 months (and one day) of non-posting right after promising to post more often.

So my Friday resolution is: I will never promise to post more.

I've also created a new category called "Posts about promising to post more." Non-believers can subscribe directly to that feed to keep track of my resolution.

Instead, I'll point to Gretchen and say, "Awesome." I'm not a hiring manager, but I have occasionally thought, "it can't be that hard to hire someone?

And who knows... maybe I'll have something interesting to talk about in a couple weeks.

One year anniversary

justsean — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 09:56:00 GMT

Amusingly, I see that today (Jan 9) is the one year anniversary of the start of this blog. In that time, I've done a grand total of 13 posts, making for an average of one per month. While I'm still doing better than some people, I'll make a new year's resolution to do a little better this year. :)

Thinking back over this year, a lot has changed. When I started this blog, I didn't really know what to expect. I'm not the kind of person who can just dump the thoughts in their head out and move on. I'm certainly not the kind of person who enjoys sharing the minutiae of their day with the world. As a general rule, I seriously doubt whether anyone cares what movie I saw last night, or what album I'm listening to right now or where I went on vacation last month. No offense to the folks who do write like this -- it's just not me.

The landscape of Microsoft blogs at the time was primarily developer-oriented (Scoble not withstanding) with most Microsoft bloggers posting from gotdotnet.com and talking about new C#, Avalon and Visual Studio features. I was convinced for a long time that it would be very difficult for me to find anything to write about.

For one thing, all the features I was working on would ship in Longhorn -- which, even at the time, was a year or two away. One thing I would not do is talk about features that we had not announced yet. Aside from making my management upset, it's just a bad practice, because, as the changes in the Longhorn product have shown, until a piece of software ships, every feature is maleable. So, I would rather not talk about something and get people excited until I know for certain that it's real.

So, with all my work targeted for Longhorn, what could I talk about? Well, Service Pack 2 certainly helped. Around the time I started writing this blog, we began to push very heavily on the wireless updates. That meant that within a short period of time, there were new features out there that I could talk about. In fact, I put off starting the blog until after the first SP2 beta (I first started playing with the idea of blogging about 6 months before that).

During the year, I began experimenting with random posts about topics that were on my mind or about our experiences during development, and while I have no idea whether or not anyone really reads them or cares, I've personally enjoyed them very much.

So, in the next year, expect some more pontification as well as some pointers to the things that interest me or catch my eye.

Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year :)

Sean

Still alive..

justsean — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 00:32:00 GMT

It's been a busy few months, and I haven't had time to post -- first shipping SP2, then working on some Longhorn planning.

As of Nov 1st, I'm no longer working on Windows Networking (except peripherally). I've joined the the IE team as a senior PM in the Browsing Experience team (which is generally -- and imho, unimaginatively -- called BrowseUI). I can't say much about what I'm doing just yet, but I will have a bunch to say both here, and on the IEBlog.

Until then, I'm working on a few posts that are left-overs from my previous life working on Networking. Stay tuned.

Open for business (again)

justsean — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:04:00 GMT

I’m back. I took a little vacation from my “experiment” to attend to wrapping up some features for the next release of SP2. Yeah, I know it’s facetious to call blogging an experiment when it’s clearly done by tens of thousands of people, but it’s an experiment for me, so that’s all that counts :)

Anyway, I got some great feedback and comments from my previous posts, which make me very excited for the possibilities. I did want to spend some time clarifying what exactly I do, and what I can and cannot influence/change.

I’ll start with something easy – I don’t have any influence over apps stealing focus from the current window :) I’m 100% in agreement with the comment that apps should not steal focus, and many people much smarter than I have worked on (and are working on) that problem.

What do I have influence over is any UI in Windows that has to do with Networking. Ah ha, I hear you say. So you’re the guy to talk to about Internet Explorer – that’s Networking, right? Well, not really. If you want to hear all about IE, I’m not your guy (but maybe Jeff is). IE is an application that uses the network. What I do is help you (the user – assuming, of course, that you use Windows) actually get connected to and disconnected from various networks over various media (wired, wireless, etc). I like to refer to what I do as the “Network Configuration and Connection Experience” (it doesn’t make a snappy acronym though, so I don’t use it very often).

So, a laundry list might help: Network Connections Folder and all it contains (property dialogs, connection dialogs, etc), notification area icons for networking (fondly known as “the blinky lights”), Wireless (Wi-Fi) connection dialogs, some parts of the Bluetooth experience, the New Connection Wizard. I also work very closely with the folks who have responsibility for the Windows Firewall, the Network Setup Wizard, Internet Connection Sharing, and the Network Bridge. Oh, and I’m responsible for the netsh.exe command line utility.

There are a few more things, but they’re geekier and I’ll only talk about them at gunpoint.

What do I mean when I say “I have responsibility?” Well, I’m not a developer – I don’t write code (anymore). I’m a program manager, and here is the HR explanation of what that means. I work with a team of kick-ass developers and testers who are truly the folks who deliver the product you see (Hi, guys!). My core deliverable is the “functional specification”, which describes how a feature should work. Once that’s done (or at least, the first cut of it – because it constantly evolves as the product is developed), my role is a bit of project management, a bit of day-to-day troubleshooting, a bit of cheerleading and a bit of evangelism. The amount of each varies from one day to next.

Okay, enough of this content-free post. I’ve got more interesting (at least to me) stuff coming.