Monthly Archives: April 2008

If you are on the Redmond Campus…

If you work for Microsoft in Redmond and would like to learn more about the projects I just posted about, we are having a “information session” from 13:00-14:30 tomorrow.

Don and Chris will be demo’ing some of the magic that we have been working on for the past couple years.

Email me to get the S+.

New Languages & Compilers

Several months ago, I posted about my team looking for language and compiler experts.

It is not very often that you get to be part of a team that is developing a programming language that aspires to be used by every developer on the Microsoft platform.

In addition, it is not very often that you can be part of a team that aspires to radically change the dynamics of building a new language, to the extent that a developer can write their own model-driven language in a straightforward way while getting all the language services (Intellisense, colorization, etc.) for “free”.

I am lucky enough to be on such a team – and if you are interested you could be as well.

We are hiring engineers to work on a language that will directly drive our model-driven platform:

Principal Development Lead
Senior Development Lead
Principal SDEs
SDEs

We are also hiring engineers to work on a “meta-language” and framework to build the above, enable “Emacs.Net” and expand the languages used to drive our model-driven platform:

SDE
Senior SDE
Senior SDE

If the first set of jobs look interesting, please email the development manager for the model-driven language team: Elliot Waingold.

If the second set of jobs look interesting, please email the engineering lead for the compiler framework: Giovanni Della-Libera.

Emacs.Net

Several months ago, I posted about us hiring for a project that I described as Emacs.Net.

This post generated considerable interest.

People seem to really want a lightweight, highly configurable, script enabled editor.

The key scenario that we are going after is a text editing experience that is approachable for both developers and information workers for new modeling languages that target both types of customers jointly.

This project is just at the inception stage right now, so there is an opportunity to have significant impact on its feature set, design and engineering.

People have asked for more information about specific jobs on the project.

They all involve a mixture of design, implementation and test work, and are available at a wide range of experience levels:

Mid-level Development Engineer 
Senior Development Engineer
Very Senior Development Engineer

If you are interested in having an in-depth discussion about these positions, please send email to the engineering manager driving the project:  Anthony Moore.

Redfin

Redfin doesn’t support Safari on my iPod Touch.

How do that they expect me to look for a house with some acreage in Northern California?

On Beyond Zebra

Someone has a good sense of humor and understanding of how our team likes to codename projects.

I just got the below book in the mail (to my Microsoft address) from a book store in England.

I have some ideas on who sent it.

Google

Over dinner tonight, my oldest daughter (by 15 minutes) interrupted my wife and I to said:

“Why are you and mommy always talking about Google. I don’t even know what it is, but you are always talking about it.”

:-)

Being a Leader

For years, I struggled interacting with people that I believed just “didn’t get it”.  The right answer was just so obvious and clear — how could they not see it?  Why was I wasting my time trying to explain this to them?  In the end, I would often just avoid these people and “lock them out” of involvement in whatever it was that I was doing.

Talking with many others in my industry, this is a common refrain.  Interesting, everyone thinks they “get it” and it is the other people that don’t.

Over the course of the last few years, I have learned that I was the one that didn’t get it.

In fact, I was committing one of the dumbest mistakes in history:  I was not leading folks to my way for thinking.  I was not making what I was doing better by understanding their point of view.  I was not helping them achieve their vision/goals in a way that could help mine.  I was just being plain stupid.

As I think about a clean summary of the above — I think about a quote that I just read from Martin Luther King, Jr (in Tricycle):

“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

As a Buddhist, you would think that this would be obvious to me.  It wasn’t, but it is now.  For those of you of a less philosophical bend (and if I could be so bold):

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality definition of leadership.

Flock

In the same vein as FriendFeed, you should check out Flock, if you haven’t.

Imagine if Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) had these capabilities built in.

Infobus

I absolutely love FriendFeed.

This is exactly the sort of platform that we need.

I have been talking about a similar thing internally since before Indigo shipped that I termed an Infobus.

The idea is basically the same as FriendFeed save for it is focused on desktop applications as well as Web properties.

It turns out with our wonderful relay technology, this is actually fairly easy to pull off.

Imagine a platform that federated data across both your web and desktop apps — I want people to see my iPhoto pictures just as much as my Flickr pictures.

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care…”

I am now using a new domain and new blog engine (WordPress).

My old content is still available at http://www.douglasp.com/blog.

I have been on dasBlog since around 2003 (save a one period were I rolled by own).

ClemensV convinced me to move off Radio Userland (which I started using in May 2002) just before PDC 2003.

He offered me a free t-shirt (I am easy).

Sorry Clemens — we all need to move on.