Welcome Daring Fireball readers! In case you were wondering if I’ve prepared a response to the article titled The Types of Companies that Publish Future Concept Videos, take a look here.

Pictured above is Microsoft’s most recent technology concept video. Here’s their description:

Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.

As you might expect, John “Daring Fireball” Gruber, who’s often been called Apple’s freelance PR guy, viewed it with a jaundiced eye:

This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.

Of course, he’d never say such a thing about Apple’s classic Knowledge Navigator video, which at the time it was made – circa 1987, when the Macintosh II and SE, IBM PS/2 series and Amiga 500 and 2000 were brand new machines – was at least as pie-in-the-sky as this newest Microsoft video. It’s contained within one of the segments of the video below, which features videos by Apple:

Now I’ll agree with Gruber that by and large, Apple technology is generally more enjoyable to use and feels more like “the future”. I will also agree that my former employer, whom a former coworker recently referred to as “The Fail Ship Microsoft”, seems a shadow of its former self and far less likely to be the company to create future industry-defining products than Apple — or at least the incarnation of Apple with Steve Jobs as Chief Tastemaker. Today’s Microsoft doesn’t have a keeper of the vision: Bill Gates has left to focus his on saving the world, Ray Ozzie, the guy who took on the role of “chief visionary” at The Empire, resigned last year along with the Entertainment and Devices division’s last, best hopes, Robbie Bach and J Allard. The people who remain are extremely skilled techies, astute suits who can continue to drive sales and “keep their managers’ scorecards green” (that’s a common expression within the company) and an evangelism team that’s second to none and of which I was a proud member, but they’re all hamstrung by decision-makers with the sense of vision that God gave oysters. That’s one of the reasons I left the company: to be an evangelist, you have to believe, and I didn’t believe anymore.

I part ways with Gruber in his declaration that Microsoft should spend more effort making some cool stuff today and less on creating concept videos. Concept videos aren’t promises of products coming in the next one or two years, but act as a star by which people can navigate the future and an inspiration to invent it. Working with technology means dealing with overwhelming amounts of minutiae, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the technology for technology’s sake and forget about what it’s all for. I would argue that if Microsoft wants to rehabilitate its image and regain its relevance in the hearts and mind of both the alpha geeks and the public at large, they should probably make more of these videos, not only for the public, but for their own benefit as well. Without visions like concept videos to guide them, especially with the lack of someone in the visionary role, they may remain stuck on their current course: doing well but effectively coasting, content to make incremental improvements to already successful products or playing catch-up as with Internet Explorer, phones and tablets in efforts that are in danger of being too little, too late.

Some other concept videos worth watching include these old AT&T ads from that played all the time between shows in the early 1990s. Many of the predicted devices and services in these ads came to be, but AT&T had little to do with their creation:

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini was a user interface guy at Apple from 1978 to 1992, after which he worked at Sun and created the Project Starfire concept video, a little drama that illustrates his vision of the office of the future. Just as Apple’s Knowledge Navigator has the 1980s all over it, this video has all the earmarks of early 1990s television, right down to the incidental synth music that’s straight out of the better, earlier seasons of Beverley Hills 90210.

Here’s part one:

The first thirty seconds of the video shows how risky it is to try and add little “realistic” touches to a story about the future. In the first thirty seconds, Princess Di is mentioned as having joined the British House of Lords; in real life, she died seven years prior to the story’s setting of 2004. Also sad is the fact that while Sun existed in 2004, it would be absorbed by Oracle six years later.

Here’s part two:

Compare the Starfire video with this “vision of the future” video that Microsoft debuted at the TechReady conference in early 2009. Popular Science said that "The 2019 Microsoft details with this video is almost identical to the 2004 predicted in this video produced by Sun Microsystems in 1992." I’ll leave it to you to make the call:

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

If you were to go to Microsoft Canada’s blog for mobile developers as of this writing, you’d still see my photo in the banner:

I really have no complaints about still having my face there, even though my last day at The Empire will be five months ago tomorrow. Being the Windows Phone guy was one of my favourite parts of my stint as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and it’s always an honour to share a banner with Frederic Harper.

My real complaint is that the picture they’re using is from two years, and more importantly, twenty pounds ago (about the weight of a full-sized accordion).

Hey Microsoft: keep my picture up if you must, but could you at least use a newer, somewhat skinnier one? Perhaps one with me sporting my new, fashionable, I probably-paid-too-much glasses with Philippe Starck frames?

(By the bye, that’s my bathroom in the photo. I have a damn fine “re-bachelor” pad.)

If you’d much rather have a photo keeping with the mobile theme, may I suggest this one, where I’m posing with a phone and a wacky phone accessory? The pink says “Metro” – in every sense of the word!

That’s my friend and fellow ex-Microsoftie Verna Kulish’s Moshi Moshi Retro POP handset, which plugs into just about any smartphone. Feel free to Photoshop out Verna’s iPhone and replace it with an appropriate Windows Phone device – perhaps a Samsung Focus (my Windows Phone) or whatever Nokia’s releasing this fall.

Feel free to use either pic, Microsoft – as long as it’s current and skinnier, we’ll be cool.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Here’s a testament to Steve Jobs’ influence on the industry: a snapshot of the tech news aggregator site Techmeme, with the stories about Steve Jobs, his resignation and Apple highlighted. As I wrote this post, the answer to the question on everyone’s mind, the “Tim Cook: Apple is Not Going to Change” story, became the headliner.

Also notable: at the bottom of the story pile: a story about Microsoft. The Techmeme page used to be peppered with them, but they’ve become increasingly rare over the past couple of years. If it weren’t for the sponsored BizSpark articles in the right-hand-side column, there’d be times throughout the day when there were no Microsoft-related stories at all. In the meantime, I can’t recall ever checking into Techmeme and not finding an Apple-related story.

Keep in mind that this is all based on casual observation and not from carefully logging the contents of Techmeme over the past few years. However, I’m there fairly often as a practitioner of the Global Nerdy technique for using Techmeme to drive more people to your blog.

Good on Brandon Watson of the Windows Phone Team for seizing an opportunity offering free Windows Phone 7s to WebOS developers. I may occasionally complain that Microsoft has trouble trying unorthodox things or deviating from MBA-proscribed plans, but that’s rarely been the case with the Windows Phone 7 team and the Windows Phone 7 Champs (of which I was a proud member).

It looks as if Brandon’s quick thinking paid off: WPCentral reports that he’s received over 500 email responses.

He’s also fired off a quick email to greet people who responded to his offer. In the email, it includes email addresses for Windows Phone Champs in several countries. The problem is that one of the Champs listed for Canada is me, and I don’t work at Microsoft anymore.

If you’re a Canadian developer looking to get into Windows Phone 7 development, drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com and I’ll connect you to the right people. I may not be in the Windows Phone Champ game, but I’m always happy to help developers out.

In recognition of some damn good evangelizing, and to make sure I don’t forget about all the .NET developers out there, Microsoft Canada sent a big package to me at the Shopify offices containing some fabulous parting gifts, including a Dell Latitude E6500 with 8 gigs of RAM and the large battery:

…along with the Samsung Focus that was assigned to me, and DVDs for Windows 7 Ultimate and Office Professional 2010…

…and last but certainly not least, an MSDN subscription, which gets me all kinds of developer goodies including Visual Studio (still the nicest IDE out there, in my opinion):

I’d like to thank Microsoft Canada (and Damir Bersinic, who made the arrangements) for these fabulous parting gifts. They weren’t under any obligation to send anything other than my final paycheque and expense reimbursements, but they’re taking a page from Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank You Economy, and I greatly appreciate the goodies. I was wondering how I was going to continue with Windows Phone and XNA development, but thanks to my old employer and coworker, that question’s been answered. I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The news is all over online – perhaps you saw the PC World article or the official Microsoft announcement – Office 365 is out as a public beta and ready for you to take it for a spin! It’s the successor to BPOS, Business Productivity Online Suite and gives you productivity goodies such as:

• Hosted email and calendaring with Exchange Online
• Online collaboration through SharePoint Online
• Real-time conferencing and telepresence through Lync Online
• With certain subscription levels, you get Office – Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, to be precise, as part of your service plan

Here’s a diagram that gives you the 10,000-foot view of what Office 365 can do for you (click to get the full-size version):

If you’d like to get the public beta of Office 365, office365.ca is the place to go! You’ll find out more about the various packages available for business, from small businesses who want to get stuff done but don’t have the IT department or infrastructure, up to the biggest enterprises looking to integrate Office 365 with their own infrastructure for that special you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter IT goodness.

There’s also the Office 365 Blog and the Office 365 Technical Blog, which show you how to best take advantage of Office 365 tools as well as performing advanced tasks and troubleshooting issues. If you’re the competitive type, there’s the Ready for Work contest where you can win $50,000, a one-year subscription to Office 365 for your business and more – and all you have to do is share your Office 365 success story on our Facebook group.

Go for it – sign up for the Office 365 beta now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Me and Ballmer at the Microsoft Town Hall in Toronto, October 2009.

David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson recently wrote in the excellent blog Signal to Noise (add it to your reading list if it isn’t there already) that he’d never work for Ballmer.

Since he’s DHH, he doesn’t have to – he’s a principal at the development firm 37signals, whose web apps I like to cite as examples to follow, and the creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t DHH: we can’t all be brilliant game-changing programmers who are also photogenic enough to have the option of becoming a male model when this computer fad blows over. When a Sith Lord from Microsoft comes a-calling with a job offer, we don’t automatically turn it down; we have to mull it over.

I’ve been working for Ballmer (quite indirectly: I’m a fair number of degrees of separation below him on the org chart) for the past twenty months. I can say with complete certainty that out of all the jobs I’ve held – from the job right out of school building multimedia CD-ROMs in Director to working with Cory Doctorow in his dot-com’s evangelism office in San Francisco at the height of The Bubble to various coding jobs from my own consulting shop to Toronto’s worst-run startup to that very brief stint as a go-go dancer at a nightclub – my current gig as Developer Evangelist for The Empire has been my all-time favourite of the bunch. I get to do two things I absolutely love – working with technology and schmoozing with people – and with a fair bit of autonomy: in the setting of my choice, with a set of priorities that I negotiate. I also get to work with some of the brightest and most passionate people I’ve ever met, both inside and outside the company, and it doesn’t hurt that the pay’s quite nice (although, as Dan ink will tell you, money isn’t the primary motivator in this line of work).

Playing accordion onstage at RailsConf 2007.

Until 2008, I’d worked mostly for small companies, many of whom you could fit into a minivan. I might not have considered working for Microsoft, or any large corporation for that matter, had it not been for a little moment that I internally refer to as “The Abercrombie Epiphany”. And oddly enough, it happened at RailsConf 2007, a conference devoted to DHH’s creation Ruby on Rails, where I played an ode to DHH onstage with Chad Fowler at the start of the evening keynote (that’s what’s pictured above, and there’s even a video of the song).

The second day’s opening keynote was about Ruby, Rails and the enterprise, and the crowd was not impressed. A good chunk of the IRC backchannel chatter was devoted to saying “enough with the enterprise already…who cares?” I distinctly remember someone referring to one of the presenters as “trying to be the Rachael Ray of enterprise computing”. The guy leaning against the wall behind me (I’d arrived late, having taken part in the previous night’s bacchanalia) in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt started putting on a hoodie with the letters “A & F” on it and packing up his laptop. “Who uses this stuff, anyway?” he said to me as he picked up his Starbucks cup and walked towards the door. “I’m going back to the Marriott.”

It was probably the fact that he was wearing all that Abercrombie & Fitch – the company vaguely annoys me – that got me thinking about his question, “who uses this stuff anyway?” It turns out he did: he’d flown to Portland, stayed at a chain hotel, used a laptop and conference wifi, drank coffee from the shop with a branch in every mall and seemingly on every corner and bought clothes from a century-old retailer – and the cycles that enabled all that didn’t run two-week-marathon-written code living on 10-dollar hosting, but invisibly and everywhere on systems he didn’t think anyone used.

I wouldn’t give the incident any thought until just over a year later.

Packing up my stuff after getting laid off from b5media, September 2008.

What got me thinking about that little Abercrombie & Fitch experience was my getting laid off from b5media during the econopocalypse of summer 2008. I’d been interviewing with a number of companies, all of them small, and blogging the experience as a means of amplifying my job search efforts.

While working on a blog entry, I got an IM from Adam Carter, a tech evangelist at Microsoft. It went exactly like this:

Ever thought about working for The Empire?

(Yes, he referred to Microsoft as “The Empire”.)

Every culture has certain tendencies, and the “I build on Mac OS and deploy to Linux” culture of which I was part led me to instinctively dismiss the idea at first blush. Ridiculous, I thought, and besides, why would they hire me? I haven’t coded any .NET since those trivia games for MAXIM in 2002.

(Yes, I really did that, in an office across the street from the downtown Toronto Hooters. It was like working inside a beer commercial.)

But when my friends John Bristowe (who I’d have voted “most likely to work for Microsoft”) and David Crow (who I’d have voted “most likely to take a dump on Microsoft’s front door”) were making suggestions within the company that they hire me, I had to give Adam’s out-of-the-blue IM a little more thought. And in that thinking, I was reminded of the Abercrombie incident.

Many people would (and did) see working at Microsoft as “the safe move”, but to a guy from the culture of DHH, who’s always worked in all small companies and one medium-sized one and hadn’t used their development tools in over six years, it’s the scary one. When word got around that I was interviewing at Microsoft, I heard a small chorus of voices – one of them that nagging voice of doubt – saying the same thing: “You couldn’t pay me to work for Ballmer”.

But I took the job, anyway. It offered the most challenges, the greatest learning opportunities, a journey to places well outside my comfort zone, and I hadn’t done anything like it before. It was a window into a world I’d only seen from the outside, toward which I’d only made snarky comments from the peanut gallery. It offered me the lever that Archimedes talked about – one big enough to move the world – and a chance to see this computing the Abercrombie guy thought no one used.

(It even gave me the perfect excuse to pull out the Jean Cocteau quote at parties, when explaining my change in career direction: “Since it’s now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.")

Yesterday’s work enviroment – my setup at HacklabTO.

What is working for Ballmer like? I can’t speak for all of Microsoft’s 90,000 employees, but this Developer Evangelist job is pretty sweet. I’m classified as a mobile worker, which means no cubicle – I’m either working out of the home office, a select bunch of work-friendly cafes, or quite often at HacklabTO, the “hackerspace” in Toronto’s colourful Kensington Market where I’m a member with 24/7 access. Every day’s work environment is different (the picture above shows yesterday’s, at the Hacklab), and this constant flux keeps me going.

I get to noodle with all sorts of interesting tech, from dev tools to cloud computing to game consoles to phones, and I have a hardware guy stocking me with the latest gear. I get to shape the content of a cross-Canada conference that thousands of professional developers across Canada, whose work makes your money move, your electricity flow and your favourite retail stores stay stocked. I get to participate in all sorts of fun stuff, from holding a pre-conference in a train car to having a little fun with Richard Stallman. I get to inspire students as they start their search for jobs in a shaky economy. I get to concentrate in the web, mobile, and open source — fields where the company’s traditional strengths aren’t.

Simply put, I get my shot at changing the world. That’s what DHH is also trying to do – he’s just working it from a different angle. If you want to do that as well, I’m sure you’ll find your own angle, whether it’s homesteading in your own indie software company working out of a cafe to doing it as a part of a Fortune 500 company. DHH is DHH, and you are you, and while he could never work for Ballmer, you might like it like I do, and that’s okay. After all, that’s why the saying goes “Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek what they sought instead.”

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Sometimes, you have to do more than just start from scratch. Sometimes, you have to burn the boats.

“Burning the boats” is an expression that comes from a story – some say legend — about Cortes, the Spanish Conquistador (and yes, the subject of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer). Wishing to guarantee that his men would stay in Veracruz (which he’d just taken over from the Governor of Cuba) and only move forward into terra incognita without retreat, he ordered them to burn the ships that brought them to the New World. It was an extreme measure, but without the distraction of a way home, they committed themselves completely to business of exploring and conquering.

The Original Mac: No Arrow Keys

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, former user interface guy at Apple and the company formerly known as Sun, and now member of the Nielsen/Norman Group, wrote about how Apple burned the boats back when they released the original Macintosh in his 1992 book Tog on Interface and more recently in an article on his blog, AskTog.

In 1984, the Macintosh represented a break from the dominant paradigm at the time: the command-line interface. Back then, you’d issue commands to a program these ways:

• Typing them in
• Using control-key combinations
• Using function keys
• Using the arrow keys to navigate

Software developers at the time had little experience developing for GUIs, which meant that there would be great temptation for them to simply develop apps for the Mac the way they did for other platforms. The software they’d end up writing would be a command-line app that just happened to run on the Mac.

Steve Jobs and Apple’s Macintosh team, an unconventional bunch who were said to have nary a classical computer science degree among them, thought that existing software sucked. I was 16 at the time, and I’d have to agree. In order to prevent straight ports of existing software to the Mac, they decided to “burn the boats” and make it difficult for developers to “go home” and simply rely on the UI techniques from the Old World. The first Mac keyboards didn’t just omit the function keys, they also left out the arrow keys:

Tog writes:

That was a big deal. Almost every application then in existence depended on the arrow keys (then called cursor keys) for navigation. With that one stroke, Steve reduced the number of apps that could be easily ported to the Mac from tens of thousands to zero, ensuring that this new computer would have a long and painful childhood.

It’s counterintuitive to want to have your creation go through a long and painful childhood, but there was a method to their madness. In “burning the boats” by getting rid of the function and arrow keys on which developers relied and taking away their “way home”, they forced developers to redesign and rewrite their applications to fit a mouse-driven graphical interface rather than a keyboard-driven command-line interface.

They eventually brought back the arrow keys about a year and a half later. By that point, developers had grown used to developing GUI apps that took advantage of the UI controls and mouse that we’ve come to know and love. The return of the arrow keys at that point would now be a welcome addition and convenience, rather than a dangerous temptation to return to “the old ways”.

It was a bold move, but when you’re making radical changes to the way things are done, bold moves are often required.

Windows Phone 7: No Copy and Paste

There’s been some talk about Windows Phone 7’s lack of copy and paste. It’s similar to the hue and cry about the original iPhone’s lack of copy and paste, and having been reminded by Tog’s article about the design decisions made for the original Mac, I can see the method to Microsoft’s madness.

“Copy and paste already exists in Windows,” people have said, “why not Windows Phone 7?”

The answer is simple: because Windows Phone 7 apps aren’t supposed to be like Windows apps. For non-enterprise, non-industrial use, the “Windows, but scaled down” approach of previous versions of Windows for phones, which goes under the name Windows Mobile, didn’t catch on (Windows Mobile still rules the roost for compact devices used in enterprises and industries, and will be supported for years to come). Hence Albert Shum’s completely different-from-the-desktop, and even different-from-other-phones Windows Phone 7 interface, which went by the codename “Metro”.

The use of copy and paste implies a keyboard-centric user interface, which isn’t what Windows Phone 7 is about. People often use their smartphones one-handed, with only their thumb to access the touchscreen. Windows Phone 7’s interface takes this usage into account, which is why it’s sensor-centric, and applications, should get their information from touch, gestures, accelerometers, location and other sensors where possible. By not including copy and paste in the first release, the Windows Phone team is “burning the boats” and asking developers “How do you write apps so that they don’t need intricate more-suited-to-the-desktop operations like copy and paste?”

(And yes, copy and paste will eventually find its way into Windows Phone 7, just as the arrow keys, function keys and even right-clicking found their way into the Mac.)

The same could be said for many other things that were purposely excluded from Windows Phone 7, such as the compact edition of SQL Server that was part of Windows Mobile. If you think about it, this design decision forces you to build apps so they store and retrieve data from the network, which makes sense, since phones are devices that network with both cellular and wifi.

Windows Phone 7 represents a radical shift in the way Microsoft stuff works, from a very minimalistic look to its task-centric organization. In order to make sure that people built apps that fit it, the Windows Phone 7 team had to burn the boats. It’s a bold move, but it’s the right one.

Nice phone, shame about the name.

As I quipped in an earlier post, the name “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a bit long, and suggests that the people who do Microsoft’s branding get paid by the syllable. This is the sort of left-brain-lopsided mindset that has produced names like “Windows Server 2008 R2”.

My fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe pointed me to this Joy of Tech comic which attempts to ratiocinate the etymology of this unwieldy appellation:

Whenever Microsoft needs to make a radical change in the way they do things, they bring in a hip Asian guy. That’s why they’ve got me shaking things up on Microsoft Canada’s Tech Evangelism Team, and it’s also why Albert Shum is redefining the way Microsoft does mobile phones in his role as the Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. True to my earlier statement that Canadian techies have been punching well above their weight class since Alexander Graham Bell, Albert studied engineering and architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Here’s a video featuring Albert talking about the design philosophies behind the completely reworked from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7. It’s featured in the Microsoft News Centre article Windows Phone Designer Seeks the Right Balance.

I like what he says at the end of the video:

What will our users see first? I think hopefully they’ll see themselves in the phone. I think that’s a really key part of how we designed it. It’s really focused on making this phone your phone. We took the idea of making it personal, so that when you look at the start experience, it’s about your content. It’s about your people, it’s your pictures, it’s your music, it’s presented way up there.

My phone is going to be different than your phone, and I think that’s a really key part: that personalized way of navigating the thing that you care about, the things that you want to share, the things you want to listen to, and those are the key moments where we first present that it’s your phone.

If you’re thinking up ideas for applications to write for Windows Phone, keep what Albert says in mind: it’s not about feature lists; it’s all about the user and the user experience.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Sheep Canada and Other Perspectives

Every now and again, I make it a point to pick up some reading material on a field or industry that’s completely unrelated to my own. I find that it both satisfies my curiosity and helps me see things from a completely different perspective. In one particular case, when I found a copy of Sheep Canada lying abandoned on a subway seat, I enjoyed the puzzled and concerned looks from the other passengers as I read the magazine. Not only did I get a little entertainment, but I learned a little bit about what goes into making the lamb chops and sweaters I love.

I also like asking people questions about their work, especially if it’s in field different from my own. It probably stems from the fact that everyone in my immediate family is in medicine; I’m the “black sheep” who went into computer programming. I often chat with my wife and her co-workers at the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (a fascinating line of work, by the bye), my father-in-law about that branch of the insurance industry that concerns itself with executive benefits, friends who work in the television and movie industries, and so on. I love hearing their stories and find that seeing their perspectives broadens my own.

I’ve even taken on little non-developer side jobs just to get a different perspective. I’ve moved an entire warehouse of high-end dresses, had a fair bit of success as a street musician, gotten ink-stained at an old school print shop and even had a stint as an accordion-playing go-go dancer at a Toronto nightclub.

You Go Hither and I’ll Go Thither

It’s this “wanderlust of the mind” that probably led me, a guy who was actually quite happy in the “develop on the Mac, deploy on Linux” world, to becoming a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft. Each world has its own history, culture, customer base and approach to technology, and each offers lessons to the other. As I’ve said before, technology is a great big smorgasbord, where there are enough seats and dishes for everyone and every taste. Wouldn’t it be a waste if you stuck only with the dishes you knew?

I’ve spent the last year getting reacquainted with the Microsoft development world, and it’s different in many ways. There’s the obvious stuff such as operating systems, programming languages and tools. There’s also the more subtle stuff: conference demographics and what people do in the hallways at conference, the sort of apps that get written, what people do in their spare time and so on.

Don Dodge is experiencing the same thing…just in reverse. Just as I’ve gone from being a Mac guy to running Windows 7 as my primary operating system, he’s crossed over from Windows to the Mac OS and writing about his experiences with the transition in an article titled From MSFT Evangelist to Mac Enthusiast – The Other Side of the Road.

There are some lessons to be learned from Don’s observations, a fact that wasn’t lost on Todd Bishop. In his article on Don’s “switching” experience, he writes:

This sentence, in particular, caught my attention: "After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple fanatics I decided to go to the other side of the road to see for myself," Dodge writes.

Good for him, but the fact that he hadn’t seen the other side of the road as a Microsoft employee is a symptom of a larger problem at the Redmond company. Loyalty to and appreciation for your own products is nice, to a point, but after interacting with people at Microsoft for the better part of the past decade, I’ve never quite understood, logically, why it’s taboo for its employees to use competing products.

…

…think what would happen if Microsoft employees experienced and saw around them, every day, a true reflection of the competitive landscape — including Microsoft products and rival technologies. My hunch is that they’d come away with a better understanding of what motivates specific consumer actions, and how they might be able to get consumers to pick Microsoft products instead.

Todd, you took the words right out of my mouth. It’s right along the lines of my own philosophy, which I wrote about in the article Evangelist, Immigrant and Shaman:

What Microsoft needs badly is a shaman. They need somebody who is situated physically within their culture, but outside it spiritually. This isn’t a person who hates Microsoft, but it’s a person who can actually see it. I can do this for you. Give me a hut in your parking lot. I will eat mushrooms, roll around in your cafeteria, and tell you the Goddamned truth.

It’s the style in which I do my work. Yes, I devote a lot of time and effort to Microsoft’s tools and technologies, but I make sure that they’re not the only things I look at. I try to keep abreast of things like the IDE conventions in XCode, what’s happening in the worlds of the iPhone and Android, non-Microsoft languages and frameworks such as PHP, Python and Django, Ruby and Rails, templating systems like HAML and Sass and the NoSQL movement. Each has lessons (the Microsoft term is “learnings”, which I refuse to use, since I consider it a non-word) that can be incorporated into the Microsoft world, just as I’m sure that we too have lessons to offer to these other worlds. And in the end, we’ll all get better tools and technologies for our work, life and play.

It’s something you should try as well. Try using some tool or technology that you wouldn’t normally use. Hang out with developers from “the other side”. Pick up a copy of Sheep Canada. Broaden your perspective and see what you’ll learn!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s a little hint: if you ever get an invitation to a Microsoft party from High Road Communications – they’re Microsoft Canada’s PR firm – accept it. They’re always in great places, have great tapas and drinks and they always invite interesting people. You’re guaranteed to have fun, and that guarantee is doubled if I’m there.

The W’s “Extreme Wow” Suite

On Thursday, right after the end of Day 2 of TechDays Montreal, my fellow developer evangelist Christian Beauclair and I made our way from Centre Mont-Royal (the TechDays Montreal venue) to the W Hotel. That’s where we were holding a little party to which we invited a number of local open source developers, some of who were at the previous night’s Career Demo Camp Montreal.

Montreal’s W hotel is a building that has undergone a radical personality change. It used to be the Banque du Canada building, the home of one of our federal government’s most stuffy, buttoned-down organizations. W hotels tend to be the exact opposite: everything about them suggests that they were designed by people who usually design nightclubs, what with DJ booths in their lobbies, electronica and funk music piped into every nook and cranny, dimly-lit hallways with lighting straight out of Blade Runner and other little touches that make it seem as if you’ve somehow managed to get into one of those secret clubs in New York City’s Meat Packing District. Simply put, it’s a pretty good place to hold a swanky cocktail party,

Christian and I followed the directions to the “Extreme Wow” suite that High Road had booked for the party. Here’s what we saw when we entered the room:

The suite was located on the top floor of the W. It was one large room with a 20 foot-high ceiling and an equally high set of windows revealing a balcony looking out onto Square Victoria and a good chunk of Montreal’s skyline. I had a sense of deja vu and soon realized that the place reminded me a little bit of Tony Prince’s swanky condo in the videogame The Ballad of Gay Tony, minus the mobsters to whom Tony owed money and wanted him dead.

Near the back of the suite was the bathroom, which in the spirit of open source, was itself open concept and had nothing to hide. Rather than being tucked into a separate room, the shower, tub and sinks were poised on a split level four or five steps above the rest of the room, with the shower stall being a glass-and-brick enclosure in the middle of it all, looking like the monolith from 2001. The tub was recessed into the floor beside it and covered with a sheet of plywood for the party, either in order to prevent people from falling into it or to prevent me from attempting to start a party hot tub:

(Thankfully, the toilet had its own separate “water closet” room, just off to the side.)

The room had been rearranged to better suite a party than overnight guests. The bed had been removed and replaced with a hybrid couch/chaise lounge:

Just about everything in the room could be commanded via the master remote control, which Christian found. It controlled lights, the TV, sound system and even the curtains and skylight blinds (which could be opened and closed via remote-controlled servos):

Here’s a view of Square Victoria from the balcony:

Christian also found a table centrepiece that reminded him of an M.C. Escher image that I had used in my slide presentation at Career Demo Camp Montreal:

For reference, here’s that M.C. Escher piece:

Having checked out the place and taken my first set of photos, I did what I always do in such a setting: I got got a drink from the bar and made myself comfortable.

The Presentations

It wasn’t just cocktails and conversations at the party. We had some presentations as well, starting with Nik Garkusha, part of Microsoft Canada’s Open Source Strategy team. He talked about how Microsoft views open source, as well as the work we’re doing in order to make Microsoft and open source work better together.

I split his presentation into two videos. Here’s the first…

…and here’s the second:

Brendan “Digibomb” Sera-Shriar, developer with Optimal Payments, WordPress evangelist, founder of PHP Toronto and WordCamp Toronto and organizer of WordCamp Montreal, talked about his experience working with The Empire: “They’re actually doing open source!”, his use of Windows and the Windows Platform Installer and how open source and Windows can work together:

Yann Larrivee, developer, founder of PHP Quebec, FooLab and the upcoming ConFoo conference, spoke next. He talked about how he enjoyed Make Web Not War 2009, the importance of “playing well with others” both inside and outside the world of open source and how Microsoft is participating in ConFoo:

Marc Laporte, developer of TikiWiki, and among other things, talked about PHP running under IIS. It’s in French, and if anyone would like to give me a hand translating, I would appreciate it greatly!

The Party

As nice as the photos of the suite above are, the place looks far better when it’s filled with guests:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

On Wednesday, a mere hour or so after the end of Day 1 of TechDays Montreal, came Career Demo Camp Montreal, a community event that combined presentations on job-hunting and career-building with demos of projects by Montreal-area developers.

What’s With All These “Demo” and “Camp” Events and Techdays?

For this year’s edition of TechDays, we decided to try something new. TechDays is a two-day cross-Canada conference taking place in seven cities – Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg – and all the conference events take place during the day. There are no events scheduled for after 5 p.m., which means that on the evening of Day 1, the venues are ours – and unused. Since they’re already set up for presentations and it costs relatively nothing to hire an A/V tech for a few extra hours, we decided to make our venues open to local developer community events. We even lent a hand in helping put the events together.

This year, we opened our space to four such community events:

• Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver with the help of Boris Mann
• FailCamp Toronto 3 in Toronto with the help of Justin Kozuch (Refresh Events) and Meghann Millard (Unspace)
• Career Demo Camp Montreal with the help of Jean-Luc SansCartier (iWeb) and Yann Larrivee (PHPQuebec/Confoo)
• …and next week’s Demo Night in Canada in Ottawa with the help of Colin Melia (Ottawa .NET Community) and Scott Lake (Startup Ottawa)

The Career Portion

People started milling in at around 6:00 p.m.:

The evening began with Alex Kovalenko, Director of Operations at the tech recruiting company Kovasys. His presentation was all about what smart job hunters do, how to write a good tech resume, and the elements of a successful tech interview.

Alex was joined by a couple of his coworkers at Kovasys for the Q&A session, which included the question “What kind of salary can a PHP developer command in Montreal and Toronto? If I recall correctly, their answer what that in Montreal, they’ve seen a range of CDN$55k for starters to CDN $90k for leads. Salaries are 15% higher in Toronto, but with that comes a commensurate increase in the cost of living.

Next came my presentation, Better Living Through Blogging, in which I talked about how having a blog has improved my life in a number of way, not the least of which was to help land me the last four of my jobs.

Blogs, I argued, were probably the most effective way for you to have control of your online identity and therefore to put your best foot forward to potential employers and customers. Among that stats and opinions I cited in the presentation were:

• 77% of recruiters surveyed by ExecuNet said that they use search engines to check out job candidates.
• According to CareerBuilder.com, 1 in 4 hiring managers say that they use search engines to research potential employees.
• SearchEngineWatch.com reports that there may have been up to 50 million proper-name searches in 2006.
• Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun: “If someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative.”

That was followed by a quick presentation by my coworker at Microsoft, Open Source Strategy guy Arun Kirupananthan, who used Dragon Ball Z as a metaphor for Microsoft (as Vegeta) and Open Source (as Goku) and how they can work together and talked about the Make Web Not War conference, which will take place in Montreal in May 2010.

The Demo Portion

The first demo was by Brendan “DigiBomb” Sera-Shriar, who presented WPTouch.

“With a single click,” he said, “WPTouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with Ajax-based article loading and effects when viewed from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or Blackberry.”

Next up: Patrick Lafontaine, MySQL developer and DBA:

His presentation was on how to back up your MySQL databases effectively and for free-as-in-beer.

(I have to give Christian Beauclair kudos for volunteering to be his mic stand. It’s not easy holding a mic in a single position for ten minutes!)

Then came Sylvain Carle of Praized:

Sylvain talked about the Praized API, which lets you harness their “white label” local search platform fro finding people and services in your local community.

After Sylvain came Marc Laporte demoing TikiWiki, a Full-featured open source multilingual all-in-one wiki with content management and groupware features, written in PHP. It’s our plan to make TikiWiki one of the apps included in Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer:

Bruno of DokDok did the next demo. DokDok is a way to share, track and version files of any size, and it’s done using an interface that everyone understands: email.

Then came Marc-André Cournoyer and Gary Haran of Talker. I liked the Ruby pseudocode that they displayed on the big screen:

Talker is a group chat application that is particularly good for collaborative work. I may have to give it a try soon.

Testatoo – I think it’s a pun on “tests à tout”, or “tests for everything” – was the next presentation, which was given by David Avenante.

Here’s a closer look at Testatoo in action:

The final demo was Pierre-Luc Beaudoin’s L’Agenda du Libre du Quebec:

L’Agenda du Libre is an online calendar of Free Software events in Quebec and was implemented in Django in under 30 hours:

The Aftermath

This was the first DemoCamp-style event where the presentations were some presentations were done in English while others were done in French. I felt like a Family Guy character listening to Stewie Griffin during the French presentations: I got the general gist, but missed out on the subtleties. Guess I’m going to have to work on my French!

With the demos done, all that was left to do was to award an XBox 360 Arcade to the presentation that the audience liked most, based on their applause. Marc-Andre and Gary of Talker won, and in a very generous move, decided to donate it to the Salvation Army so that some kids who’d otherwise never get the chance would get a video game console this Christmas. Nicely done, gentlemen!

No DemoCamp-style event is complete without a trip to the pub afterwards, so about 35 of us moseyed down to the 3 Brasseurs on Avenue McGill College and St-Catherine, where Microsoft bought the first round of pitchers.

A few brave souls, Arun and I kept the party going at Benelux where we continued to chat and drink until 2 in the morning, after which I had to scurry back to the hotel in order to get some shut-eye for Day 2 of TechDays Montreal.

I’d like to thank the following people for Career Demo Camp Montreal a success:

• All the presenters, for putting in the time and giving great presentations. It’s not possible without you!
• Jean-Luc San Cartier and Yann Larrivee for helping us put it together on the Montreal community end.
• Christian Beauclair for his invaluable assistance with the A/V setup.
• Matthew the TelAV A/V guy for his work and for staying late.
• TechDays head honcho Damir Bersinic for giving me the latitude to use TechDays’ space for community events.
• Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy team of Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for helping to put this thing together on the Microsoft end.

(By the way, if you’ve got an open source project and are wondering what Microsoft can do for you, you’d do well to get in touch with Nik and Arun, shown below!)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I knew that I might be a little too busy to write an anniversary blog post with my work schedule this week. That’s why I wrote that article last month to mark having worked at Microsoft for 11 months. My schedule was a little less hectic then. Go and read the article if you like – everything that I wrote then still applies today, with the notable exception of a month’s time having passed.

Having said that, I still like celebrating milestones, so I thought I’d mark this day with a quick photo-collage featuring Yours Truly on the job:

As I wrote earlier: “It’s been great so far. I’m going to stick around for a little while.”

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

TechRadar UK is publishing a series of “Windows 7 Week” articles, some of which take a look back at the history of Windows. One of the articles presents a timeline of Windows packaging, from version 1.0 to 7:

…and another is a chronology of Windows’ boot screens:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays Toronto Wraps Up

TechDays Toronto took place last Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was a success! Over 1200 people registered to attend, and based on the attendee comments I’ve received, both face-to-face and online, people found their experience there both valuable and enjoyable.

As much as we hope the attendees learn at TechDays, we learn a lot at TechDays too. By holding events where you get to meet us face-to-face and talk to us, we learn about what you need to boost your knowledge, skills and career. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about TechDays, please let us know! Leave a note in the comments or feel free to drop me a line.

When Halifax got added to the cities in TechDays Canada’s cross-country conference tour, there was some concern about how many people would register. It’s the first time we’ve held a conference of this scale and scope in the Maritimes, but it turns out that we needn’t have worried: as of Thursday, every available seat for TechDays Halifax’s venue has been sold.

Thanks for being so enthusiastic, Halifax techies, and we look forward to putting on a worthy event!

TechDays Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg Coming Up

The early bird pricing – that’s $299 Canadian – is still available for the other TechDays Canada cities:

• Calgary (November 17-18)
• Montreal (December 2-3)
• Ottawa (December 9-10)
• Winnipeg (December 15-16)

With over forty intermediate- to expert-level sessions covering Windows 7, SharePoint, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, Expression Blend, Windows Server 2008 R2, WCF, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, System Center, Silverlight and more, TechDays Canada is your chance to learn about how to make the most of the Microsoft tools and technologies that are available right now. Register today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here are a couple of shots from the Toronto edition of TechDays, taking place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre right now.

The Room

I’m the lead for TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, which I like to think of as the best damned track in the entire conference. The pre-registration numbers for this track were pretty high, so they gave me room 718A, a large room with a capacity of about 400 or so. The rows near the front of the room have table space for the people who like taking notes with their laptops, while the back rows have more conventional lecture-style seats.

Here’s the room as seen from the back:

And here’s the speaker’s-eye view:

Day 1, Session 1

At the time of this writing, I’ve just finished my opening monologue in which I introduced the track and explained what it’s all about. I handed the stage over to Cory Fowler, who’s doing the What’s New in Silverlight 3 presentation. Here’s a shot of Cory in action:

I like what Cory’s done with the presentation: he took the original presentation from the Microsoft TechEd conference and spiced it up with graphics from the new XBox game Halo 3: ODST, adding his own personal touch.

If you’re interested in finding out what’s new in Silverlight 3, there are a couple of things you can do:

• If you’re in or near Halifax, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal or Winnipeg, you can still register for TechDays in those cities at the early bird rate of $299.
• Watch this blog! I’ll be posting articles on Silverlight 3 development in the coming weeks.

A Vending Machine We Can’t Refuse

On the 600 level of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s South Building, right by the registration booths, are two of these machines:

That’s right, it’s a vending machine that makes kosher hot dogs, on the spot, for the low, low price of five dollars. In spite of the fact that TechDays provides a free lunch, we cannot resist the siren song of this machine (Sizzlelicious!). We’ll be shooting some video around noon of us ordering and tasting a hot dog from this machine. Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What is WebsiteSpark?

If you run or work at a small web design or development firm, WebsiteSpark might be for you! WebsiteSpark is Microsoft’s new global program who goal is to help small web companies succeed.

What Do You Get When You Join WebsiteSpark?

What do you get with WebsiteSpark? I put together a little graphic that explains it pretty quickly:

• Visibility: By being showcased in the WebsiteSpark marketplace as well as through opportunities creating through The Empire’s marketing and business networking programs.
• Support: You’ll get hooked up with an entire ecosystem of Microsoft support, network and hosting partners, and web developers and designers so you have a wide range of technical and business resources.
• Tools: Full-on access to full versions of current Microsoft web tools and technologies, such as the goodies listed below:

What You Get	What It Is
	Silverlight For building rich internet applications that can do multimedia, access data from the web and can also be run on the desktop.
	Expression A suite of tools for building websites, user interfaces for Silverlight and desktop applications, making web and application graphics, encoding video and building prototype applications in a hurry. You get: - 1 user licence for Expression Studio - Up to 2 user licences for Expression Web
	SQL Server Web Edition  Microsoft’s database platform for data needs of all sizes, from the simplest web form to full-on enterprise applications. You get a 4-processor licence of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition.
	Windows Server 2008 (and 2008 R2 when it becomes available) A server that’s both powerful and easy to maintain, featuring the IIS 7 web server and the Web Platform Installer, which makes it easy to install and upgrade popular web applications. You get a 4-processor licence of Windows Server 2008 (and for 2008 R2 when it comes out).
	Visual Studio Professional The IDE (integrated development environment) that has it all. You get up to 3 user licences of Visual Studio Pro.

Are You Eligible to Join WebsiteSpark? Answer These 2 Questions.

If you can answer “yes” to the two questions below, you are!

1. Is your company a professional service firm whose primary business is providing Web development and design services for its clients?
2. Does your company have 10 or fewer people, including owners and employees?

Once you join WebsiteSpark, there’s a simple obligation: in order to continue participating in WebsiteSpark, you must deploy a new public, internet-accessible website developed using the tools and tech given to you by WebsiteSpark within 6 months of joining.

You can stay in WebsiteSpark for up to 3 years. On the first and second anniversary of your initial enrollment, you must update it – that is, confirm your company hasn’t gone public or its ownership hasn’t changed.

I Don’t Have a Fee-For-Service Web Shop, I Have a Startup. Can I Get in on This?

No, but we have a program for you – it’s called BizSpark.

I’m a Student and Have Limited Money, and It’s for Books and Beer. Can I Get in on This?

Dude, we have something just for you! It’s called DreamSpark.

How Do You Find Out More?

The details about the program are at the WebsiteSpark site. Check it out, and if it’s right for you, sign up!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

While Kris Krug was taking photos of me for TechDays, his assistant Danielle was holding up a light reflector and remarking that I seemed to really love my job. I hadn’t yet told her that I really loved my job; I was just doing my thing, running my track of the conference, chatting up the attendees and missing most of the lunch break to play accordion and pose for a photo shoot. I’d been up since before sunrise on the morning of the first day of the first of seven conferences where I’m acting as track lead for the first time and she knew it – it’s hard to fake enthusiasm under those circumstances. I was “on” because I love my job.

As I write this — September 20th — it’s been exactly eleven months since my first day as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. I suppose I could have waited another month for the traditional anniversary to talk about my time with The Empire, and were I a little less enthusiastic about my job, I probably would have done just that. But I can’t wait, so why bother?

It hasn’t even been a year since I got laid off from my last job: that anniversary doesn’t happen until September 24th – this Thursday. The insult-added-to-injury of getting laid off on my own wedding anniversary (they didn’t know, but the layoff was still worse for it) makes the event a little more memorable. It also gave me the choice of viewing the days to follow as a trial or an adventure. You already know which one I chose.

Thanks to the help and referrals of a lot of a readers of both The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy, I had a job interview or job-search-related meeting on nearly every day of the three weeks between my getting laid off and my signing the offer letter from Microsoft. These meetings were all quite different: I had a great interview with a great small company, an interview with a company that I thought would be great but turned out to be scatterbrained, and even an interview with a company I expected to be a Mickey Mouse outfit but turned out to have surprising depth. I also had interviews with Microsoft: six of them, in fact.

I have to admit that I had some concerns about joining The Empire. After all, for the previous 6 years, I’d been using Python and PHP, and then working my way into becoming a Rubyist. I used open source tools to write software and either Mac OS X or Ubuntu in my day to day work. I was deep in the culture and the scene of the “I work on a Mac and deploy onto Linux” crowd. Could I work for Microsoft? And could I work in an office park out in the burbs?

(The last time I interviewed for a job in an office park in the burbs, this happened.)

You already know the answer, but you might not know the reasoning behind the answer. “It’s the money!” is everyone’s first guess, and it’s a good one – just not the right one. Yes, a company like Microsoft would be able to give its workers decent salaries. It certainly played a factor in my decision, but a couple of the other potential jobs were offering roughly the same number of ducats. However, if money were the primary factor in my career choices, I’d have gone for one of the programming jobs at a bank or insurance company that were available to me right out of school instead of starting at $12.50 an hour at a CD-ROM company run by art school grads. But I suspect that you wouldn’t be reading this blog – probably because I’d be neck deep in a mid-life crisis.

For starters, the job isn’t out in the burbs. In fact, I haven’t worked in a situation as flexible as this one since I was a self-employed consultant. The field people in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team are classified as mobile workers and most work out of their home offices, with occasional visits to the office for meetings. I split my time between the home office, cafes (where I’m surprisingly productive), the Hacklab (a “hackerspace” in Kensington Market to which I have 24/7 access) and the Microsoft office out in the burbs, where I show up to gain access to the most important network: not the corporate one, but face-to-face contact with my non-remote coworkers in various departments.

Another perk of the job: considerably more control over my own destiny than one might expect. A Microsoft evangelist’s role is pretty broadly defined, specifying the what of what we do. The how part is defined in our commitments, a document where each of us writes how we’ll fulfill our role, on both an individual and team level and then gets agreed upon with our managers. I happen to report to John Oxley, an exceptionally understanding manager, so when I threw away the suggested “hows”, wrote my own from scratch and set a couple of rather ambitious goals, he approved them.

I wouldn’t have joined Microsoft had I not seen the signs of some course corrections, the cumulative effect of which I like to refer to as “The Sea Change”. There are lots of factors, including an increasing willingness to “play well with others” – embracing standards, an emphasis on interoperability, participation in community events, the hires of unlikely people including my friend David Crow, and a lot of good tech, ranging from great developer tools to platforms like Silverlight and XNA, to the then-upcoming technologies like “Red Dog” (which became Azure) and ASP.NET MVC (still in beta back then) to the fact that they were starting to look at what an open source approach could do for them. Yes, the company still is a bit hung up on desktop computing and its old  approaches – it’s hard to walk away from the goose the laid the golden egg for two decades – but there are signs that change is afoot.

Finally, there’s the challenge. Evangelizing at Microsoft means reaching out to a larger body of developers and techies than I ever could anywhere else, working with a platform than spans embedded systems to high-performance machines to data centers spread throughout the world – and doing so for a company facing the challenges of its size, its competitors and its own past.

To put it a little more simply: Any fool can evangelize Apple or Google. It takes a rock star, ninja and Jedi master all rolled into one to be an evangelist for Microsoft. It’s not that there’s nothing from Microsoft to evangelize – it’s just that there are lot of factors that make the job something that not just anyone can do.

I view my job as so much more than winning techies’ hearts and minds on behalf of The Empire. It’s about making big changes: changing the company, the culture of high tech, the field of software development and yes, the world. It’s a bold, audacious, chutzpah-riffic set of goals and it won’t be easy – but the most rewarding work rarely is.

So here I am, eleven months later. The work has been exciting, rewarding and challenging. I believe I’d started to make my mark on the company and hopefully someday, the industry. Every day, I get the opportunity to do the things I love to do: write code, talk to people and come up with new ideas, often in the surroundings of my choosing. I feel like equal parts Don Draper and Don Box!

It’s been great so far. I’m going stick around for a little while.

I can’t close this article without a few thank-yous:

• To my manager John Oxley, for hiring me, trusting that I would temper my wacky ideas with solid judgement, giving me the freedom to operate in the way that lets me work my magic and for making sure the higher-ups were aware of my work.
• To David Crow, for being one of the guys to recommend to DPE that they hire me as soon as he heard I’d been laid off.
• To my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe, for mentoring me through my freshman year at Microsoft and for being the other guy to recommend to DPE that they hire me.
• To my former VP Mark Relph, for his support.
• To the rest of my team, who are too numerous to name, but whom I hold in the highest esteem.
• To the other groups within The Empire with whom I work: CSI/Interoperability, Windows Phone, Open Source and our event organizers Maritz – I hope to keep on working with you folks!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.