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So soon after A Day in the Life #3 , you ask? Indeed! There are a few questions that I get over and over from people both internal and external to Microsoft, and I thought I’d address them in a blog post. Question #1: “I’m a third-party speaker (or ‘I know a third-party speaker…’) who has spoken at other events that would make a fantastic speaker at PDC. What can I do?” I get this one almost every day. Sometimes, they suggest a specific topic, and other times they say that they’re quick learners who can present on any topic, and if we have a session without a speaker, they’d likely be the perfect fit. While I honestly appreciate their enthusiasm and interest, the nature of PDC content makes it extremely difficult for anyone who didn’t actually architect or build the product or technology to authoritatively present. As you may recall from A Day in the Life #2 , PDC is not an event where we provide training on today’s technologies (except in our pre-conference sessions ). PDC content is organized Read More...
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Before I forget, be sure to check out the latest videos on Channel 9 in our weekly Countdown to PDC2008 series (or just look for anything tagged PDC08 ). The 10-minute-or-so shows are fun to make, and Jennifer and I would love your feedback, questions, and suggestions. Plus, we’ve been introducing a new Hard Hat Challenge on each episode, and winners receive a very limited edition PDC2008 t-shirt. Note that these are not the official event shirt (especially, since the event shirt hasn’t been selected yet )…these are the shirts we give to the internal Microsoft team. Okay, let’s get to A Day in the Life #3 . I’d been thinking about possible topics for this third installment when the obvious answer popped into my head. How about a literal diary-style account of an actual day at work? It might seem a bit mundane, but it would truly be in the spirit of the series. So, let’s give it a go. To start, there’s nothing abnormal or atypical about this past Thursday, August 14, 2008. It was the day Read More...
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Jennifer Ritzinger and I have started a new show called Countdown to PDC2008 , and we just published our first episode on Channel 9. We’ve been recording an internal video series (of the same name) for about ten episodes now, and some fellow employees suggested that the format might also work for an external audience. So, we decided to try it, and we’d love your feedback! Specifically, if you have any questions about the conference, or if you’d like to hear about a particular topic on a future show, please add your comment to the post. We’ll do our best to address them. To keep things short, tight, and packed with information, we use an old skool analog kitchen timer. Yes, we know that it runs a bit fast, but you know what? We will abide, and “at the ding, we’re done”…even if we’re in the middle of a word. That way, even if we suck, we won’t suck for long. For astute viewers, the fact that we’re standing up and using a kitchen timer might even make this an Agile show. Okay…I’m just rambling Read More...
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[You can skip to the last two paragraphs if you’d like to offer suggestions] Here we are…one month later with the second post in a series about the PDC2008 Content Owner role. If you don’t know what a Content Owner does, I’d recommend reading PDC2008: A Day in the Life #1 for context. As mentioned in the prior post, one of my responsibilities is to coordinate and drive two meetings each week with many representatives from across Microsoft. The members of this team are critical thinkers who help define, create, and shape the content we’ll present at PDC2008 in October . But how do we select our content? How do we know which sessions make sense and which ones don’t? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that many Microsoft employees have an engineering mind-set, and we tend to want everything defined in terms of an algorithm (yes, I’m guilty too ). But when it comes to content, though we do have many measures and metrics, a bunch of smart people talking and arguing about what makes the Read More...
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If you read my What Do I Do post, you'll know that I'm the Content Owner for this year's PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. MIX08 is behind us, and I've just recently transitioned away from my Web GO role. This means that I can now focus 100% of my time and attention on our October event. It's going to be fantastic! One of the many responsibilities I have as Content Owner is to create the master schedule for the event. This is the schedule that tells you which session is in which room and at what time. For PDC 2005, we delivered over 200 sessions at the conference, not including repeats (we run repeats of popular sessions that are filled to capacity). Because PDC is where we talk about the future of Microsoft's platform, all of the content relates in some way to our overall strategy (which is typically delivered during big keynotes and general sessions). This means that some sessions need to be scheduled ahead of others to provide foundational and prerequisite knowledge. For example, a 200-level Read More...
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A few days ago, I received the following e-mail: Help me out here. I've been reading your blog off and on for years and I can't figure out what it is you do. Your obviously involved with the PDC and MIX conferences, you send a lifesize cardboard cutout of yourself as your resume, you've made a plug-in for Illustrator and a converter for Flash files (which rock BTW), you take amazing photos, you implement seam carving in your "spare time", you write Tivo gadgets, you taught me about continuous integration with your orb article, your article on code review was mandatory reading in one of my classes, you read quite an collection of books, you seem to be pretty good at design considering you claim to be a geek, you build small arcade machines, you counted to a freakin' million, you worked with Tom Skerrit, you write music, you build medical software, and who knows what else. Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. :) I just read through your old posts cuz I couldn't remember all of this! Just what Read More...
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We've extended hosting for the PDC05 post-show sessions through June 30, 2006. Hosting was originally Read More...
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