Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily reflect those of my employer
Friday, November 01, 2002
Huge congratulations going out to Peter Drayton. I've had the pleasure of working with Peter on Groove Web Services. We hired him to do some consulting for us and it was so worth it. The guy came in to a large and complex system and within a day or so he was all over it. In addition to pointing out all the things we got wrong with our wsdl, he convinced us to move away from a traditional RPC style API to a more "Web architecture friendly" approach. At first I thought it was all academic, but now that I've been living under this regime I can see the advantages. Our final product will have a little flavor of Peter sprinkled on it.
Anyway, Peter is a tremendous talent and Microsoft will be better off with him. Plus it will be great to have a friend and collaborator infiltrating the collective. Good luck Peter! Can't wait to see what you cook up.
7:41:16 AM
Life without Groove: I'm working on a big project. Its very intense right now. I'm back and forth from the office to my house, working constantly. (Yeah, I know its unhealthy - but we have to ship!) I've migrated my development environment to this laptop, but in so doing I had to temporarily disable my Groove account. This turned out to be a bad idea. I hadn't realized how much I depend on Groove now. It has become fundemental in the way I get work done.
For example, I work closely with another engineer. I'm constantly sending him messages and chatting. Often we're in real-time and we'll have a chat window open and we're debugging stuff and dropping new binaries in the space. We can do so much together so quickly that it becomes natural and the tool is suddenly transparent. I think it got so transparent for me that I took it for granted.
Last night I got a temporary account running and rejoined the space for my project again. The cool thing is that its now GWS enabled so my next post to the space will have to come from a remote SOAP call! The natural flow of communication came back, and all was right in my world.
Groove takes some getting used to. And it takes some effort. Groove is not just technology, but its also centered around people. It takes effort from both fronts. Just because you have some collaboration software doesn't mean you suddenly know how to collaborate online. It takes some practice. But the payoff can be huge. I can't imagine life without Groove...
7:08:05 AM
Growing-up broadband: My kids are growing up in a house with broadband internet. My daugher is 6 and can surf the web, print paper dolls to cut out or pictures to color in. She can reboot the system and logon. My son, who is 9, is into video games. He gets a new game, then pops open a browser. As I watch from the corner of my eyes I see him type: www.google.com into the address bar. Next he's searching for cheat codes for his new game.
These kids are growing up with the Internet as a given. Its just always there. Always has been. And then I find myself saying things like, "Son, when I was a boy we didn't have the World Wide Web. We had Gopher, ftp and telnet. And we liked it."
