John Lam on Software

Microsoft Technical Summit

Yesterday, Jim Hugunin and I did an on-campus presentation at the Microsoft Technical Summit. This is an event where we invite folks from outside of the Microsoft community (read: folks who don’t use / are not interested / do not like) our technology to have a conversation with technical folks inside of the company. This was a very useful conversation for us to collect feedback on what we’ve done and what we could be doing in the future.

If you’re interested in what the attendees thought of the event, check out some of the coverage:

Ben Galbraith
Channy Yun
Travis Swicegood
Bryan Hansen
Scott Preston
Dion Almaer

Jolt Awards

I attended my first Jolt Awards this year as a spectator, after 3 years as a judge. I’m happy that Iron Python was a Jolt Finalist this year, and that the Data Dude was a Jolt winner (an old friend of mine, Jason Clark, was a key driver behind that product).

I had a brief fanboy moment when I was introduced to Craig Newmark, the founder of the venerable Craigslist. He was a very nice and humble guy. It turned out that he was at the conference because he was one of the co-presenters for the Jolt Awards:

You can see the rest of my photoset from the Jolt Awards here.

TechFest coolness

I went over to TechFest week with an old-fashioned notebook expecting to take notes about the things that I saw over there. When I got there, I discovered that I wouldn’t need my notebook at all. Instead, each booth contained a little card scanner that would scan my Microsoft smart card. The TechFest web site then created a page called “Things I saw”, which contained links to internal web sites for each project.

This ‘opt-in’ style of transmitting information to attendees is really useful. I only got one email message (aka spam) from the 20 or so booths that I swiped my card at; everyone else respected the opt-in nature of the experience. It would be really cool if more conferences started adopting technology like this – it doesn’t need to be a smart card – any scannable token would do.

Woodland Zoo

This weekend, we had Carolyn’s parents up for a visit. We took them and the boys to the Woodland Zoo in Seattle. It was an overcast day, so the weather was ideal for shooting some photos. Here’s the best of the lot:

A bald eagle over at the raptor exhibit:

A heron that landed near the penguins:

Some penguins walking the circuit:

A sleepy jaguar:

I processed these images using Adobe Lightroom. This is an excellent product with a visually stunning user interface. I also own a copy of Aperture but this is clearly a superior product. I’m not sure if it’s superior enough to warrant ponying up $199 for it, but I’ll reserve judgement for a few more weeks.