John Lam on Software

My first week at Microsoft

Wow. It’s over. Finally. And now I can reflect back on my first week as a member of the collective. Here’s some photos of the campus back when there was snow:

Here’s Mt. Rainier towering over Building 42:

Here’s the mountains behind 156 Ave:

The implant didn’t hurt all that much. My first couple of days at Microsoft involved signing up for various things like benefits, payroll, and parking. It also involved going through New Employe Orientation, where you get to find out some more things about the history, size, and ‘diversity’ at the company, as well as things that you can and cannot (well more about the cannot part) do as a Microsoft employee – essentially your responsibilities as a corporate citizen.

Here’s a photo of Building 122:

Jon Udell was in my orientation class, and he had a great observation about just how confusing the benefits presentation was, and how it can be improved using social networking technology. The idea is to hook up people with similar life circumstances with each other so that they can discuss these things. For example a benefit like the flexible spending account is important to me since Matthew’s in preschool, but that same benefit would be unimportant to the new college hires that were in my orientation class because of their differing life situation.

I believe that some of this stuff can be answered using some of the internal mailing lists at Microsoft. As a new hire, I’m wary about drowning in email, so I’ve avoided (so far) signing up for those distribution lists. Instead, I’m relying on the ‘hallway advisors’ to help me out. There are a remarkable number of folks that I have met / know that have been out on paternity leave over the past year or so, so there’s no shortage of people in similar ‘family situations’ to me.

I managed to accidentally score a window office as my team is in the middle of an office move. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts – I suspect my new office will be next to the boiler room in the basement :)

One example of the sheer size of Microsoft involved getting my alias setup. The seven letters of my name (John Lam) are not unique enough to generate me an alias that would not be ambiguous or just outright silly (and I didn’t get an ambiguous alias). Thanks to some lobbying on the part of my manager’s manager, we fought the IT policy … and won!

I attended my first few team meetings as well, experienced the joys of observing a re-org that I wasn’t a part of (or frankly could really understand), as well as getting the experience of being the dumbest guy in the room. There’s an enormous amount of information overload as you walk into a world that, while somewhat familiar from the outside, is very different since everyone here is focused on what the outside world would call a ‘future release’. 

I’m also spending time figuring out what it means to be a ‘Program Manager’. I suspect that will take the longest amount of time to figure out. But as far as I can tell, it involves an awful lot of meetings :)

First day in Redmond

January 10 was my first day in Redmond. We (my dog Kobe and I) left home at around 3:30am EST and arrived tired but happy at Sea-Tac airport at 1:30pm PST. The poor dog was locked inside of his kennel the entire time, but he bounced back fast – he’s a Black Lab, and he’s a very resiliant and good dog.

Once we got to our temporary housing in Sammamish, we promptly got snowed in! This was not what we expected our first night in the Seattle area to be :) We had no food except for the little welcome package that our corporate housing company left for us. Fortunately for us, Dominos was delivering in the snow that night, so Kobe got a lot of human food that night!

The next morning, this is the scene that greeted us outside:

Here’s a photo of our temporary house:

Here’s a photo of the house across the street:

I really like this area that we’re living in (the Timberline region of Sammamish). However, as I discovered later this week, just getting down the hill from here (less than a mile) takes on average 15 minutes in traffic!

Total time into Microsoft averages 40 minutes in the morning. We’ll have to look for another area to live, as picturesque as this area is.

I need a new phone

Must … give … Apple … more … money.

Hope it’s at Apple stores when I get off the plane in Seattle tomorrow!

June? Yikes.

Simplicity

One of the nice things that you get from putting up with the giant hassle of moving is an opportunity to simplify your life. I just finished packing up all of my ‘non-essential’ computer gear. It’s remarkable how cathartic the experience was. I have a single computer running in the house right now (my MacBook Pro).

I had a couple of servers running downstairs with a ridiculously complex networking setup involving multiple wireless access points, switches and firewalls. I’m down to a single WRT-54G access point running my wireless network, and I’m typing this thing on my Mac. I brought my Samsung ML-2150 laser printer up from the basement where it has lived for the past 2.5 years and will plug it into my Mac whenever I need to print (lots of last minute scanning / printing / emailing to do before we go). When I get to Seattle, I doubt that I’ll miss those servers one bit, as they’re going into storage while we figure out where we’re going to live.

We’ll be moving into furnished temporary housing when we get to Seattle. All of the rest of our stuff will go into storage, only to re-emerge when we figure out where we’re going to live. So we’ll live for several months with nothing more than what we bring with us on the plane, and a couple of boxes of stuff that we’re going to ship to ourselves via UPS. It’s a great opportunity to see how little of our stuff we really need to live – especially the technology stuff.

A few quick notes

Almost all of my attention has been focused on our upcoming move to Redmond. As I mentioned earlier, it’s easily the most complicated thing that I’ve had to organize in my life. We’re in the end game now, and it’s feeling like it might actually happen!

I’m finishing up a consulting project at Husky Injection Molding Systems. These guys create the machines that make a lot of the plastic goods that we consume – ranging from pop bottles to laundry baskets. The guys that I work with are professional robot programmers – and they’re all over Microsoft’s recent annoucement of the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Industrial robots are optimized for performance, and aren’t particularly intelligent – it’s all about maximizing efficiency in the production of the goods. And while I didn’t do any robotics programming myself, I’m amazed by what they can accomplish given the lack of sophistication in the tools that they use to program these things. Some decent tools would go a long ways in improving the lives of robotics programmers – and perhaps Robotics Studio is a step in the right direction.

Jamie Cansdale is organizing a charity auction to raise money for a safe drinking water and irrigation project in Malawi. There’s lots of useful software that was graciously donated by various companies (and Jamie himself), so make sure you drop by his blog to take a look.

Finally, I decided to give Windows Live Writer spin, and am using it to post this blog entry. I was amazed by how seamless the setup experience was for my Typo-powered blog. I simply entered my blog’s URL, and the username and password that I use to administer my blog. It auto-configured everything else. Color me impressed.

Jon Udell joins Microsoft!

Like many others, I’ve been a Jon Udell fan for a long time. I’m really happy that he decided to join Microsoft – I can’t think of a better guy to help tell important technical stories to the world.

Now I just have to get to work on converting Jon to Ruby :)

Moving on is hard work!

I barely have enough time to sleep these days as the clock ticks down on our time here in Canada. We’re living in a state of perpetual cleanliness while we wait for our house to sell. I’m telling you – this is no way to live! There are an insane number of details involved with the move – from figuring out how to get our dog there (there’s a travel blackout for dogs on Air Canada over the holidays!) to the tax implications of the move itself. Not to mention doing all of those little things like opening a bank account, getting a social security number and a credit card and figuring out how to forward our mail to another country.

At least the core details: where we’re going to initially live, how our stuff will get there, and who’s paying for all that stuff is taken care of by Microsoft. I’ve got a whole new level of respect for how difficult it must have been for my parents to move themselves (and me) to Canada all those years ago.

Hopefully someday soon I’ll be able to get back to work on RubyCLR.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a lecture series on my 100 mile daily commute to work. It’s called the Long Now and there are many invited lectures on topics that require a long-term outlook (and by long-term, we’re talking centuries). It’s somewhat dark at times – theytackle difficult topics like depopulation and the environment, but there’s more than a glimmer of hope in all of it. Highly recommended, and a welcome break from just thinking about technology all the time.

Unicode and Ruby

I was quite depressed listening to Tim Bray talk about Unicode and Ruby at RubyConf. While Tim did a wonderful job at explaining the problems, he didn’t really provide much in the way of a solution. Which is why I was quite happy when I read Julian Tarkhanov’s slide deck from his Unicode presentation at the Rails Show and Tell meeting in Amerstam where he introduces his Unicode hacks libraries.

I really like his idea about using an accessor proxy on String:

name = 'Claus Müller'
puts name.reverse #=> rell??M sualC
name.length #=> 13

puts name.chars.reverse #=> rellüM sualC
name.chars.length #=> 12

Notice how accessing the same string via the chars accessor correctly reverses the German string.

RubyConf 2006 in pictures

This was a RubyConf to remember. I finally went public about my move to Microsoft, and it felt so good to get that off my chest. RubyConf this year was in Denver, and we even got a nice dusting of snow!

I shot quite a few frames, and here are the best of the lot.

Tim Bray, who was quite the character:

Charles Nutter of JRuby fame:

Ryan Davis:

Glenn Vanderburg:

Laurent Sansonetti from Apple who was the other bridge implementer in the house:

Nathaniel Talbott, who gave his usual thought-provoking talk:

Ani Babaian, “the Microsoft gal” who took a lot of good-natured ribbing during the conference:

Here’s a couple of pictures of Matz, who was his usual gracious self:

Masayoshi Takahashi, the famous inventor of the famous Takahashi presentation method on the history of Ruby:

And last but not least, Rich Kilmer:

and Chad Fowler, our most excellent hosts:

Dynamic Languages, Microsoft, and me

I’ve decided to stage a friendly takeover of Microsoft. As of January, 2007 my new work address will be Building 42 at Microsoft. I’ll be working in the CLR team to help bring the love of dynamic languages out to the statically typed heathens :)

This all started back in August when I was dragged into various back rooms at OSCON and Lang.Net and presented with an offer that I could not refuse. At some point in your life, you realize that you have an opportunity to affect some real change in the world. RubyCLR was one way to affect that change, and thanks to the gracious support of my partners Barry Gervin, Dave Lloyd, and Bruce Johnson over at ObjectSharp, I was able to give folks a glimpse of what is possible. Thank you all for your generosity and your friendship.

However, my platform and reach at ObjectSharp is limited. We’re a consulting company and while we do use Ruby to deliver value to our customers, it’s literally one developer at a time (hi Andrew!) It’s a whole other thing to work at a platform company whose reach extends out to millions of developers. That’s a remarkable opportunity, and a unique privilege.

This is why I’m uprooting my family and moving all the way across the continent and to a different country. The timing is right since our kids are young enough that they won’t even notice (I was the same age as Matthew when I moved to Canada from Hong Kong). A big public thank-you to my wife, Carolyn, who has supported me since day one. I love you.

So, now begins the next phase of my life. I know that some of you have questions, but I’m somewhat limited in what I can say about what comes next. I hope you can understand if my answers are somewhat evasive or vague. I merely ask for your patience as all will become apparent in due time. It really will. I wouldn’t have put my family on a one-way flight to Seattle if that weren’t the case …

What’s going to happen to RubyCLR? It’s in reasonably good shape now, and I’m actively looking for people to help drive that project. There is still a couple of months before I start at Microsoft, so please contact me if you’re interested in helping out. The source code is released under the MIT license, so you are free to do with it as you wish if you don’t like the direction the project is taking.

What am I going to do once I get to Microsoft? This is the part where I’m going to have to be evasive and vague. I can tell you what I’m not going to be doing: I’m not going to stop blogging, I’m not going to leave the Ruby community, and I’m not going to do evil things. I see my mission at Microsoft as helping to make developers happier; to give them tools that make programming fun. That’s why I program-I enjoy programming. I like to use tools that put a smile on my face. Perhaps what I’ll be making at Microsoft will put a smile on your face too. Just be patient …

If you’re at RubyConf this weekend and you’d like to talk in person about my move, make sure you come over to say hi. I’m the guy with the giant camera in the front row.