Two weeks ago, I went back to Microsoft.
I'm now a contractor in Windows Emerging Markets,
working on a research project for an architect.
What we're doing is quite interesting
and I hope to be able to talk about it someday.
I left MS in February, after seven years on the IIS dev team.
I started out as a contractor writing
sample ASP components.
I progressed to working on
Active Server Pages performance
and quickly became a fulltime employee.
I graduated to working on
IIS
Performance in
general,
and became the IIS Performance Lead for a few years.
In the fall of 2000, I decided that I wanted to go back
to being an individual contributor,
and I worked on
http.sys
for the next two years, learning a lot about life in the kernel.
Finally, I spent more than a year as the owner of the
ADSI and WMI providers
for the IIS metabase.
When I left, I was burnt out and fed up.
I spent the next few months doing non-technical things:
house renovations, cooking,
the
Seattle International Film Festival,
travelling, photography, woodworking.
I'm no Microsoft millionaire,
so I needed to go back to work eventually.
But it didn't have to be this year.
After I got back from a month in Europe in late July,
I found that I was drifting, without much to show for my day.
I'd read a lot of blogs and cook dinner.
I did half-heartedly start a study circle with
a couple of unemployed friends, but my heart wasn't really in it.
I had long ago said that I wouldn't start looking for work before August.
When August came around, I updated my resumé and sent it out to Amazon
and Adobe.
I never heard back from Adobe, but I interviewed at Amazon.
I thought I had done well, but they decided not to make an offer.
Too bad.
Amazon is interesting and the Pac-Med building is less than
two miles from my house.
My friend Muhsin told me of a contract in his new team
at Microsoft: the job that I ended up taking.
While I was interviewing for that position,
one of the interviewers liked me enough to offer me
another contract position on the team,
if the first one didn't work out.
Another old friend, Delf, is on the team too.
It's nice to be in demand.
It helps that I have a strong resumé with twenty years' experience
and a broad range of skills.
I have friends who've been looking for tech jobs for many months,
years even, in some cases.
Certainly, my track record at Microsoft
eased my way back.
It's a little odd to be back at Microsoft,
or even back at work.
I was somewhat sour on the Microsoft experience when I left,
but the time off and the new job
are refreshing.
A contract suits me for now.
I wasn't ready to make a full-time commitment to Microsoft again
and this contract pays fairly well.
So far, so good.
I couldn't browse to the default website running on an XP SP2 machine earlier today, which was odd, since it worked yesterday, and I hadn't done anything since but reboot. Event Viewer said that IIS couldn't bind instance 1. w3svc/1 was configured to run on port 80. I thought at first that it might be something to do with the new firewall in XP SP2 blocking IIS, but that seemed odd and besides I couldn't find any mention of IIS in the firewall UI.
Then I thought of trying Port Reporter to see what was listening on port 80, and I quickly discovered that it wasn't IIS, but Skype. I dug into the Skype UI and found that "Use port 80 as an alternative for incoming connections" was checked. Clearing this made the problem go away.
This is quite odd because I've been running Skype and IIS 5.1 on another XP machine for months without problems. I just checked and "port 80" was selected on that machine's Skype too.