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I'm closing in on a month now at Microsoft. OK, not really, because with the holidays and a week out for a pre-hired trip, I'm obviously still in a bit of a ramp up mode. Although I checked in some code last week, which is very exciting. In any case, I've taken my share of cheap shots about the Borg, evil empire, M$ and the other predictable nonsense. Now I just find it sad that people spend that much time and energy on hating a company. I get it, some folks think the company is evil. Whatever. The thing that I've noticed about Microsoft, from an internal view, is that it's an enormous company. I find diversity in teams, groups, divisions, top to bottom. In orientation and training, this diversity is reinforced in every aspect...

As I posted earlier today , CoasterBuzz has now been around for nine years. That's a fourth of my life! In that time I've been married and divorced, owned three cars, had eight jobs, wrote a book and God knows what else. It's a long time. In the last year or so in particular, I've had to really stop and think about what the site means to me. I'm not the hardcore roller coaster enthusiast I used to be. I think it peaked in 2001, a year where Stephanie and I went to around a dozen parks in one year. There were so many new rides being built back then. That was also the year I committed to CoasterBuzz being a real business enterprise, largely out of necessity. In order to support the traffic to the site, I had to get a T-1 to...

I had three hours of phone interviews today with people from a company I'm very much hoping to work for. That was crazy. It's not any less exhausting doing it by phone. You start to get tired of talking about yourself. But I think it went pretty well. The last time I had that kind of marathon was in Redmond. This was a lot different, because these guys seemed genuinely interested in what I was about and what I had done. That's a far cry from Microsoft, who seemed more interested in trying to stump me or give me puzzles to solve. I'm more and more convinced that's mostly useless in assessing the ability of your subject. I felt like it was OK to simply say, "I don't know," when there was something I didn't...

It's strange how a number of different posts on my blog get comments practically every day. The big ones have to do with the failure of US education, my HP laptop from four years ago with the broken power jack, Xbox Live support sucking and the entire app/page/control event cycle based on pre-beta ASP.NET v2. A new one has become my post on my experience interviewing at Microsoft . The comments on that post were thin, but I'm staggered by the number of e-mail messages I get. They come from random strangers, people who work there now and probably know the people I interviewed with, and surprisingly, a ton of people who had a similar experience, turned off by the company as a whole. As I said in that last post, that's still something...

Wow, this is a topic that I first visited more than three years ago , and it still comes up over and over. This time, it comes to light through this post (though I'm not calling out Frans, as he's just a messenger), and ultimately by this post . I just don't understand why people spend so much time trying to neatly categorize everyone and, in the process, imply some level of superiority. People who do that suck, and they're not fun to work with. Personally, I think that 80% of software development is boring and mundane crap that most anyone can do. But the funny thing about most of the other 20% is that someone else has probably already figured out how to solve those problems, so with a little creativity and investigation, you can derive your...

I saw a TV spot today from this organization claiming a big conspiracy against American workers by evil corporate America to off-shore jobs or importation of foreigners for those jobs. What a load of crap. (Watch the sad little spot on their site... How are they gonna make that house payment? Maybe by selling that $40,000 car!) First off, the Department of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment has been on the decline for four years . For that matter, it's still much better than it has been for most of the last three decades. This kind of noise is caused mostly by tech workers. The problem is that in the post-bubble era that everyone wants that dotcom paycheck, but they can't do the work. Programmers are the most guilty of this. I realize...

Where I work: The Plain Dealer (they describe my environment on page 3) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Read More...

Over the past few years, I've written about career and happiness a great many times. (And honestly, if you're one of those people who thinks I care about your dislike for posts like this, just stop reading and move on.) It's interesting how many time things have changed since I started this blog more than two years ago, and how I'm still not entirely able to answer the question: What makes a developer happy in life? Early 2004 was an interesting time for me because I got a contract to write a book . That was an amazing experience that I treasure, even if the sales were mediocre at best and I was dissatisfied with the publisher's marketing efforts. Amazon still runs out of it from time to time. Being a technical author and...

I've said this before, but I'm really enamored with the whole Digg and Kevin Rose story. Business Week is obviously into it too, as it's their cover story. I think back to the good old TechTV days and "The Screen Savers." That was good TV, and I really miss that. To this day, I'm not exactly sure what it was about the people involved with that show, other than the fact that they were clearly for real, they were geeky and they loved technology. I think it's great that so many people from that network continue to do interesting things. Kevin's story is most interesting to me because he left the "safety" of a job at G4 after it started sucking, and decided to do his own thing. He took the risk. He had...

You know, the July issue of Wired was just full of really good stuff. It has been ages since I've read nearly every story in a magazine. If you read my blog, you know that one of my big struggles in life is, well, struggling through life. I really do think that I'm a pretty smart guy, maybe a genius, but I look around and see people my age or younger who have done far more than I have. It bothers me. If I'm so ****ing smart, then what's holding me back? So this economist, David Galenson, has this theory that there are two personality types in terms of how your genius comes to fruition . The first type is the "conceptual innovator," a person who bucks trends and creates great things early in life, then spends decades...