This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!

(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)

There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The amount of work people do in order to avoid work never ceases to amaze me. If there’s a prize for this sort of thing, we might have to award it to Aaron Siebers, 27, of Denver, Colorado, a Blockbuster employee who didn’t think that simply calling in sick was enough. Here’s the report from the UK paper The Telegraph:

Facing a night shift at a Blockbuster video store, Aaron Siebers, 27, took a serrated knife and stabbed himself in the leg. For good measure he then slashed his own face and stomach.

Mr Siebers then told the video store in Denver, Colorado, that he had been attacked by three men dressed in black on his way to work.

After stabbing himself, he was hospitalised with a deep puncture wound to his lower leg.

But his ploy sparked a large police manhunt with officers and sniffer dogs combing the streets for his attacker.

CCTV near where the incident was supposed to have taken place showed no attack and, after repeated questioning, Mr Siebers eventually admitted that he had made it up to get out of work.

He has been charged with false reporting and obstructing police.

I knew that I might be a little too busy to write an anniversary blog post with my work schedule this week. That’s why I wrote that article last month to mark having worked at Microsoft for 11 months. My schedule was a little less hectic then. Go and read the article if you like – everything that I wrote then still applies today, with the notable exception of a month’s time having passed.

Having said that, I still like celebrating milestones, so I thought I’d mark this day with a quick photo-collage featuring Yours Truly on the job:

As I wrote earlier: “It’s been great so far. I’m going to stick around for a little while.”

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

While Kris Krug was taking photos of me for TechDays, his assistant Danielle was holding up a light reflector and remarking that I seemed to really love my job. I hadn’t yet told her that I really loved my job; I was just doing my thing, running my track of the conference, chatting up the attendees and missing most of the lunch break to play accordion and pose for a photo shoot. I’d been up since before sunrise on the morning of the first day of the first of seven conferences where I’m acting as track lead for the first time and she knew it – it’s hard to fake enthusiasm under those circumstances. I was “on” because I love my job.

As I write this — September 20th — it’s been exactly eleven months since my first day as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. I suppose I could have waited another month for the traditional anniversary to talk about my time with The Empire, and were I a little less enthusiastic about my job, I probably would have done just that. But I can’t wait, so why bother?

It hasn’t even been a year since I got laid off from my last job: that anniversary doesn’t happen until September 24th – this Thursday. The insult-added-to-injury of getting laid off on my own wedding anniversary (they didn’t know, but the layoff was still worse for it) makes the event a little more memorable. It also gave me the choice of viewing the days to follow as a trial or an adventure. You already know which one I chose.

Thanks to the help and referrals of a lot of a readers of both The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy, I had a job interview or job-search-related meeting on nearly every day of the three weeks between my getting laid off and my signing the offer letter from Microsoft. These meetings were all quite different: I had a great interview with a great small company, an interview with a company that I thought would be great but turned out to be scatterbrained, and even an interview with a company I expected to be a Mickey Mouse outfit but turned out to have surprising depth. I also had interviews with Microsoft: six of them, in fact.

I have to admit that I had some concerns about joining The Empire. After all, for the previous 6 years, I’d been using Python and PHP, and then working my way into becoming a Rubyist. I used open source tools to write software and either Mac OS X or Ubuntu in my day to day work. I was deep in the culture and the scene of the “I work on a Mac and deploy onto Linux” crowd. Could I work for Microsoft? And could I work in an office park out in the burbs?

(The last time I interviewed for a job in an office park in the burbs, this happened.)

You already know the answer, but you might not know the reasoning behind the answer. “It’s the money!” is everyone’s first guess, and it’s a good one – just not the right one. Yes, a company like Microsoft would be able to give its workers decent salaries. It certainly played a factor in my decision, but a couple of the other potential jobs were offering roughly the same number of ducats. However, if money were the primary factor in my career choices, I’d have gone for one of the programming jobs at a bank or insurance company that were available to me right out of school instead of starting at $12.50 an hour at a CD-ROM company run by art school grads. But I suspect that you wouldn’t be reading this blog – probably because I’d be neck deep in a mid-life crisis.

For starters, the job isn’t out in the burbs. In fact, I haven’t worked in a situation as flexible as this one since I was a self-employed consultant. The field people in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team are classified as mobile workers and most work out of their home offices, with occasional visits to the office for meetings. I split my time between the home office, cafes (where I’m surprisingly productive), the Hacklab (a “hackerspace” in Kensington Market to which I have 24/7 access) and the Microsoft office out in the burbs, where I show up to gain access to the most important network: not the corporate one, but face-to-face contact with my non-remote coworkers in various departments.

Another perk of the job: considerably more control over my own destiny than one might expect. A Microsoft evangelist’s role is pretty broadly defined, specifying the what of what we do. The how part is defined in our commitments, a document where each of us writes how we’ll fulfill our role, on both an individual and team level and then gets agreed upon with our managers. I happen to report to John Oxley, an exceptionally understanding manager, so when I threw away the suggested “hows”, wrote my own from scratch and set a couple of rather ambitious goals, he approved them.

I wouldn’t have joined Microsoft had I not seen the signs of some course corrections, the cumulative effect of which I like to refer to as “The Sea Change”. There are lots of factors, including an increasing willingness to “play well with others” – embracing standards, an emphasis on interoperability, participation in community events, the hires of unlikely people including my friend David Crow, and a lot of good tech, ranging from great developer tools to platforms like Silverlight and XNA, to the then-upcoming technologies like “Red Dog” (which became Azure) and ASP.NET MVC (still in beta back then) to the fact that they were starting to look at what an open source approach could do for them. Yes, the company still is a bit hung up on desktop computing and its old  approaches – it’s hard to walk away from the goose the laid the golden egg for two decades – but there are signs that change is afoot.

Finally, there’s the challenge. Evangelizing at Microsoft means reaching out to a larger body of developers and techies than I ever could anywhere else, working with a platform than spans embedded systems to high-performance machines to data centers spread throughout the world – and doing so for a company facing the challenges of its size, its competitors and its own past.

To put it a little more simply: Any fool can evangelize Apple or Google. It takes a rock star, ninja and Jedi master all rolled into one to be an evangelist for Microsoft. It’s not that there’s nothing from Microsoft to evangelize – it’s just that there are lot of factors that make the job something that not just anyone can do.

I view my job as so much more than winning techies’ hearts and minds on behalf of The Empire. It’s about making big changes: changing the company, the culture of high tech, the field of software development and yes, the world. It’s a bold, audacious, chutzpah-riffic set of goals and it won’t be easy – but the most rewarding work rarely is.

So here I am, eleven months later. The work has been exciting, rewarding and challenging. I believe I’d started to make my mark on the company and hopefully someday, the industry. Every day, I get the opportunity to do the things I love to do: write code, talk to people and come up with new ideas, often in the surroundings of my choosing. I feel like equal parts Don Draper and Don Box!

It’s been great so far. I’m going stick around for a little while.

I can’t close this article without a few thank-yous:

• To my manager John Oxley, for hiring me, trusting that I would temper my wacky ideas with solid judgement, giving me the freedom to operate in the way that lets me work my magic and for making sure the higher-ups were aware of my work.
• To David Crow, for being one of the guys to recommend to DPE that they hire me as soon as he heard I’d been laid off.
• To my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe, for mentoring me through my freshman year at Microsoft and for being the other guy to recommend to DPE that they hire me.
• To my former VP Mark Relph, for his support.
• To the rest of my team, who are too numerous to name, but whom I hold in the highest esteem.
• To the other groups within The Empire with whom I work: CSI/Interoperability, Windows Phone, Open Source and our event organizers Maritz – I hope to keep on working with you folks!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.

Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.

There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

My co-worker Rick Claus (that’s him in the photo above) and I have spent the morning working on the final preparations for Microsoft Canada’s TechDays Vancouver conference at the Smart Mouth Cafe in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood. It’s a rather nice place the work, the staff are friendly, the coffee’s pretty good, and the bar at the front offers a nice view of the street.

If you’re a student at one of the eligible Canadian universities or colleges, you can get the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft Office 2007 for CDN$64. For more details, see my article in Global Nerdy.

I saw the illustrated map titled The Road to Success on the Strange Maps site and thought that there can’t be a more appropriate day than today, the first day of school, to post it. Enjoy!

Click the illustration to see it at full size.

If you’re wondering who the “Caruso” in the “Caruso can’t touch you” line is – it’s spoken by one of the people in the Mutual Appreciation Society building, in the lower-right hand corner, just above and to the left of Hotel Know-It-All – it’s Enrico Caruso, an opera tenor who became a star thanks tp his embrace of then-newfangled recording technology, namely the phonograph (a.k.a. gramophone).

Here’s the view from a conference call I participated in on a recent sunny day:

Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.

Allen Stern blogs about a sign that’s outside Rice to Riches, a rice pudding place in New York City’s East Village:

The sign reads:

Help Wanted

Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business

• Long hard hours
• Very low pay
• Lots of heavy lifting
• Work for a ball-busting asshole
• Dead-end job
• No benefits
• No advancement
• Must be college grad

Start immediately

It’s attention getting; Allen says that he saw a number of people read the sign and as a result step into the store. There’s more in his blog entry about the sign.

I wonder how many people read it and thought “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?”

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s an interesting bit of information for those of you who are reviewing prospective hires: people are more honest on their LinkedIn profiles than they are on their resumes. That’s what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Social Recruiting Summit held last week at Google.

It’s understood that people “pad” their resumes. A sizeable portion of the interview process seems to be devoted to determining if the candidate is as good as his or her resume says he or she is. I’ve been in interviews where a prospective employer had a member of the development team to sit in and act as a “bullshit detector”; I’ve also done the same duty when working at companies that were interviewing prospective developers.

I think that Kris “The HR Capitalist” Dunn’s theory about why LinkedIn profiles are more honest is spot-on:

…if you’re truly looking for "what’s up" with a candidate, you need to rely on the LinkedIn profile.  Why is that true?  Because there’s a community of co-workers, friends and past colleagues that always have access to the LinkedIn profile, and there’s no such community with constant visibility to a random resume the candidate sends in, and you have no means to circulate the resume to that type of community to fact check.

Simply put: it’s harder to lie when you’re in front of a group of colleagues who might call you on it.

Kris also talks about how many candidates don’t include the “5 – 6 bullet points that you;re usually used to seeing on the resume” on their LinkedIn profiles. This isn’t the case with me: when I got laid off from my last job back in September, I rewrote my resume completely, starting with my LinkedIn profile, after which I simply pasted the LinkedIn information into a Word document and gave it a little formatting. This approach killed two birds with one stone, affording me more time to concentrate on my (thankfully short – 17 days from my last official day at b5media to my first official day at Microsoft) job search.

I don’t know if it applies in other fields, but in the tech sector, I think that LinkedIn profiles are resumes and that you should based your resume off your LinkedIn profile rather than the other way around. Yes, the social networking aspect of LinkedIn means that you can’t pad your resume as much, but it also means that prospective employers can trust that your credentials are genuine.

 The view from my hotel room.

I haven’t been to Ottawa in 20 years. The last time, it was to visit a girl, and it ended badly. Every pedicab and rickshaw guy in town was in love with her and wished hot death upon me during my visit, and in the end, she decided that she wanted to be “just friends”.

Months later, a friend would tell me that she paid me a very nice compliment after a horrible experience with some jerk: “There are three kinds of men in the world: scum, art fags and Joey!” It’s nice for the present-day me, but did 1989-me no good.

This time, I’m here on bidniss, doing a presentation on how to code accessible websites, followed by catching up with some friends. Should be fun.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy. Like the previous article, it’s about my role at Microsoft and doesn’t delve too deeply into technology, so I thought it was suitable for a more general audience and decided to republish it here. Enjoy!

Mental Models and Bill Buxton’s “Draw a Computer” Exercise

In the mid 1990s, well before he was Microsoft’s user interface guru, Bill Buxton often asked people to carry out a simple little exercise: draw a picture of a computer. Most, if not all, of the people he asked would draw something that fit the common mental model of the desktop computer of the era: cathode ray tube-type monitor, keyboard, mouse and that box housing the motherboard and drives that many people mistakenly refer to as “the CPU”.

If Buxton were to ask the question today, the drawings of computers might look like these:

If he asked the question in the mid-to-late 1980s, the drawings might’ve looked like these:

And had he asked the question in the mid-60s, the drawings might’ve looked like this:

Buxton likes to point out that the changes in computers from the 60s onwards are largely in the implementation technology, processing power and outward appearance. When most people draw computers, he said, they’re merely drawing their mental model, which is based on the outer packaging.

However, if you use the mental model of a technologist, computers have been essentially the same instruction/ALU/storage/input-output boxes whether they’ve occupied whole rooms or fit in your pocket. They’ve been pretty much the same at their core, in the same way that fancy tech and hybrid engine aside, there really isn’t too much that separates a present-day Toyota Prius from a Model T Ford.

If Bill Buxton could approach Microsoft Corporation as a person — and hey, that’s the way the law treats corporations, so why not? – and asked him/her to draw a computer, I suspect that s/he would draw something based on mental model of a souped-up circa 2000 computer: a desktop computer with a nice flatscreen monitor, running Windows XP and having a somewhat limited connection to the ‘net.

I think that this is a problem. I also think that the source of this problem is Microsoft’s success.

Microsoft’s Company Mantras

“A PC on every desk and in every home” was Microsoft’s longest-lived slogan and the company mantra for the first 24 years of existence. Like the best slogans, it succinctly summarized the company’s goal. The problem is that the goal has pretty much been reached. In most parts of the first world, a good chunk of the second world and even a sizeable fraction of the third world, you can easily find a desktop computer, and it’s quite likely that it’s running some sort of Microsoft software.

Since 1999, the company mantra – I really hesitate the use the phrase “vision statement” — has been a little more vague. The company’s been thrashing between them a little more frequently, as you can see in this list of mantras taken from chapter 1 of How We Test Software at Microsoft:

• 1975 – 1999: “A PC on every desk and in every home.”
• 1999 – 2002: “Empowering people through great software – any time, any place and on any device.”
• 2002 – 2008: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
• 2008 – present: “Create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of internet services across the world of devices.”

The post-1999 mantra all seem a little limp in comparison to the original. Reading them, I cannot help but think of a quote attributed to web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman:

"…provide value added solutions" is not a mission. "Destroy All Monsters." That is a fucking mission statement.

Because the old mantra lasted for so long and the new mantras just don’t have the same straightforwardness and gravitas (How We test Sofware at Microsoft quotes Ballmer as saying that we may never again have a clear statement like the original to guide the company), the original remains quite firmly etched in the company culture and mindset.

I think it’s holding us back.

The Desktop as the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

The original mantra doesn’t just focus on the desktop, it actually mentions it by name. In 1975, when computers were room-filling behemoths that you could access either via batch or time-share, the concept of a desktop computer was downright radical. If you think the iPhone is impressive (and yes, it is), imagine how mind-blowing the Altair 8800, the first commercially-available desktop computer, must have been to a geek back in the Bad Old Days. It was the platform on which Microsoft’s first product – a little programming language called Altair BASIC – was launched, and it was BASIC that in turn launched the company.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how the Altair 8800 was a golden opportunity for Bill Gates and his buddies at his fledgling company, then called “Micro-Soft”. Unlike a lot of other companies at the time, they took the desktop computer seriously. Even when IBM got into the desktop computer game in 1981, it was a product of their Entry-Level Systems division, a clear indication that they thought the PC was a machine you bought until you were ready to graduate to a real computer. I don’t think that this philosophy ended up serving them well.

Since the big boys were paying no mind to the desktop computer, upstarts like Microsoft had a big empty field in which to play, and they thrived. Crack open just about any late 70s/early 80s computer that had BASIC built in – even Apple machines — and you’ll see a row of ROM chips with a Microsoft copyright notice. It was Microsoft that swooped in with PC-DOS when a deal with Digital Research for a PC version of CP/M was slow in coming (and this is despite the fact that Gates recommended that IBM go to Digital for an OS). A lot of people’s experience with desktop computers (and Microsoft revenue) is defined by circa-1995 Microsoft thanks to Windows 95 and the results of Bill Gates’ memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave, both of whose influences are still felt to this day.

Once upon a time, it used to be unusual to walk into someone’s home or office and see a computer. These days, it’s unusual to walk into someone’s home or office and not see a computer, and Microsoft’s focus on the desktop had a lot to do with that.

The Desktop as Albatross

When electric motors first became available, engineers envisioned factories and eventually houses being equipped with a single electric motor. They imagined that the central motor would, through a series of gears and drive belts, be connected to whatever machines in the house or factory had to be driven by it. What happened in the end is that rather than relying on some central motor, electric motors “disappeared” into the devices that used them. Here’s an exercise to try: go and count the electric motors in your house or apartment right now. The number should be a couple dozen, and if you can’t find them, this article might help.

When big, room-filling computers first became available, engineers envisioned businesses being equipped with a single computer in a manner roughly analogous to the aforementioned big central motor. We know what happened in the end – while many businesses do make use of big datacenters, a lot of the computing power got spread out into desktop computers.

I have a theory that comes in two parts:

1. Just as electrical motors disappeared into the devices that needed their work, and just as computing power got spread out from big mainframes into desktop machines, computing power is now both disappearing and spreading out into mobile devices and the web/cloud.
2. Microsoft, with its desktop-centric approach, at least outwardly appears to be missing out on this migration of computing power.

Most of the company’s attention, at least to an outside observer, seems to be focused on Windows 7. Yes, chances are that with computer sales being what they are, Windows 7 will probably end up on more of laptops and netbooks than desktops, but I consider those devices to simply be the desktop computer in a more portable form. It worries me that there have been more concrete announcements about Windows 7 on netbooks than upcoming versions of Windows Mobile, despite the iPhone and BlackBerry-driven evidence that the real mobile action is in smartphones.

(Tomorrow, I’ll post an article in which I argue that netbooks are a dangerous red herring pulling away our attention from devices like smartphones.)

Even when the company reaches out beyond desktop development, there’s no escaping the desktop “gravity well”. Consider ASP.NET (that is, the “traditional” ASP.NET, not the recently-released ASP.NET MVC). To my mind, as well as the minds of a lot of other web developers, it’s a web framework that tries really hard to pretend that the web doesn’t exist. It makes use of a whole lot of tomfoolery like ViewState to create a veneer of desktop app-like statefulness over the inherently stateless nature of the web and a programming model that tries to mimic the way you’d write a desktop application. It’s almost as if it were designed with the mantra “the web is like the desktop, but lamer” instead of “the web is like the desktop, but everywhere”. Although the framework works just fine and there are a number of great sites and web apps built on it, I think a lot of developers sensed this design philosophy and went elsewhere for web development.

(An aside: My old boss at OpenCola in late 2001 told me that he’d been meeting with Microsoft people and suspected that Internet Explorer 6 would be the final version of their browser. The expectation that web pages and web applications would be replaced by Windows client applications pushed over the net, a prediction similar to one made by the Java folks a few years prior.)

The same situation exists with Windows Mobile’s current user interface, which is basically a subset of Windows’ standard UI controls for the desktop, scaled down to fit smaller screens, and with a stylus standing in for the mouse. It’s almost as if it were designed with the mantra “mobile computing is like desktop computing, but lamer” instead of “mobile computing is like a mobile phone plus PDA and an MP3 player, but cooler.” If the ASP.NET design mantra is a whisper, the Windows Mobile mantra is a scream.

I suspect that the reason the XBox 360 didn’t fall into a similar kind of trap — “set-top boxes are like desktop computers, but lamer and only for games” – is that the XBox team is situated off the Microsoft Campus and less susceptible to the desktop influence.

My Mission

At my most recent one-on-one meeting with my manager John Oxley, we talked about a need for each member of our Evangelism team to define his or her area of focus. The Microsoft platform is a vast, nerdy expanse spanning the range from embedded computing all the way to Cray supercomputers; no single person can hope to cover it all.

He already had a good idea of what I wanted to focus on, and by now, I guess you do as well. I feel that just as computing expanded beyond the big computer rooms and onto our desktops, computing is expanding beyond our desktops into all sorts of different places:

• Invisibly, into the web and cloud in the form of web applications and services
• Visibly, into our pockets and living rooms, and embedded into all sorts of real-world things

While I believe that Windows 7 is a necessary part of the Microsoft platform, I’m not too worried about focusing on it – there are more than enough people at the company to promote and evangelize it. I want to focus on the platforms that I feel that Microsoft hasn’t given enough love and attention: the non-desktop platforms of the web, mobile and gaming, as well where they intersect.

It’s a big area to cover, but I think Microsoft needs to be active in this area if it wants to be true to its forward-looking roots. I even have a mantra for it: “To help web, mobile and game developers using Microsoft tools go from zero to awesome in 60 minutes.” I want to give developers both that rush when getting started with a new technology as well as the sustained passion to keep working with it, in the same way that Ruby on Rails and the iPhone got developers with an initial flash of excitement and turned it into long-term passion. It’s an ambitious, audacious mission, but no more so than the one coined by a bunch of scruffy nerds in New Mexico in the the 1970s: “A PC on every desk and in every home.”

This article also appears in Global Nerdy. I thought it might be of interest not just to geeks, but also to people who are thinking about defining their roles at work.

This week, Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is getting together to do its planning for the upcoming financial year, which runs from July to June in The Empire. There’s a lot to talk about, especially in a year that combines the Credit Crunch, the releases of new versions of Windows, Windows Mobile, Visual Studio and who-knows-what-else and a company looking to establish its place in an increasingly web- ad mobile-driven world.

A good place to start might be to think about the roles that we, as individual members of the Evangelism team, play.

Evangelist

Unlike Anil Dash and Jeff Atwood, I never had any reservations about the job title “Evangelist”. The religious connotations never bothered me. It might have had something to do with spending eight years in a Catholic school — it didn’t do me any harm, and it didn’t seem to hurt Keanu, who went to the same school around the same time. It might also have something to do with the fact that like Atwood, I think that “Software development is a religion, and any programmer worth his or her salt is the scarred veteran of a thousand religious wars.” I could never be happy with only programming; I need to mix it with sharing the knowledge and passion for the craft through writing, speaking, schmoozing, performing and entertaining.

Like evangelism of the religious kind, being a technical evangelist isn’t a job that you can do “on autopilot”. There are some jobs that you can do and even excel even though you hate them and the work is of no interest to you. No doubt you’ve seen or know people who do their jobs “on autopilot”, functioning well enough to perform the tasks required of them. Evangelism isn’t one of them. As the title implies, if you don’t have the believe in what you’re talking about, if you don’t have faith – you can’t get the job done. Evangelism is about winning hearts and minds, and people just know when you’re faking it, and once they know, they’ll never listen to you again.

I’ve wanted be a technical evangelist ever since I learned about Guy Kawasaki, who held the title at Apple in the mid 1980s. He may not have invented the title or the position – credit for that has to go to Mike Boich, Guy’s buddy at Apple – but he popularized the term and set the standard. The job engages both what we colloquially refer to as the “left brain” and the “right brain”; it requires you to tap into your rational and creative sides, often simultaneously. It’s the sort of work that I can really sink my teeth into. It is my dream job.

Nobody questions my suitability as an evangelist. People have asked about my suitability as an evangelist for Microsoft. How can a guy who’s been working largely in the open source world for the past seven or so years, mostly on a Mac, be an evangelist for The Empire?

Immigrant

I came to appreciate Microsoft’s tools after leaving my first job. In 1997, my friend Adam P.W. Smith and I left multimedia development at a shop called Mackerel, to go try my hand at building “real” applications at our own little consultancy. We wanted to graduate from building multimedia apps for marketing and entertainment purposes – software you might run once or twice and then discard — and start building applications that people would use in their everyday work to get things done.

Despite being Mac guys at heart, we chose the Windows platform since that’s what our customers were using, and opted to use Visual Basic to build our apps. Although it was considered “the Rodney Dangerfield of programming tools”, Visual Basic in the pre-.NET era was the best tool for producing great applications in a timely fashion that both we (and our customers, since they got the source code) could easily maintain. Our longest-lived application, a database of every mall in America written for National Research Bureau in Chicago, was first written in 1998 and its codebase lived on until a couple of years ago. In today’s world of ephemeral Web 2.0 apps, that’s an Old Testament lifetime.

Just as the best immigrants bring a little bit of their home culture and add it to the mix in their newly-adopted country, we decided to bring Macintosh user interface and workflow culture to the Windows world. We took care to write user-friendly error messages and also structured our applications so that you wouldn’t see them often. Our layout was consistent and everything was clearly labelled so you never felt lost in the application. And yes, we sweated over aesthetics because we felt that beautiful tools lead to better work.

Here’s the original application that we were given as a guide:

…and here’s our rewritten-and-redesigned-from-the-ground-up app that we built for National Research Bureau:

(For more on what we did, visit the page where we showcase our work.)

A decade later, I find myself an immigrant in the world of Windows development, and once again, I want to bring a bit of the cultures from which I came and add it to the mix. This time, that culture is from Build-on-Mac-Deploy-on-Linux-istan, a cultural crossroads which blends a strong design aesthetic with the focus on the web, mobile applications, unit testing, distributed version control, sharing code and a scrappy startup work ethic and spirit. At the same time, I see the potential in my new Microsoft homeland, with its expansive reach into just about every level of computing, from embedded systems to giant enterprise datacentres, its excellent IDEs and frameworks and its large developer base. As an “immigrant” Microsoft evangelist, I see the chance for me to ply my trade in a new land that needs my skills, energy and outside perspective, and earn a fair reward for my efforts.

Shaman

I’ve been trying to take how I see my role at Microsoft and distill it into a single idea, perhaps even a single word. The term “Change Agent”, which appeared all over the place in early issues of Fast Company captures a lot of what I’m trying to express, but it feels sort of clumsy and doesn’t have that summarize-a-big-concept-in-a-single-word oomph that “Evangelist” has.

Luckily for me, my friend Andrew Burke was reading an editorial in Penny Arcade which had the perfect word:

What Microsoft needs badly is a shaman. They need somebody who is situated physically within their culture, but outside it spiritually. This isn’t a person who hates Microsoft, but it’s a person who can actually see it. I can do this for you. Give me a hut in your parking lot. I will eat mushrooms, roll around in your cafeteria, and tell you the Goddamned truth.

That’s not bad. There are a number of ways in which “shaman” might be more applicable than “evangelist”.

For starters, I am situated physically within Microsoft’s culture, but in many ways I’m outside it spiritually. This is thanks to the fact that I’m a mobile worker and don’t have a cubicle within Microsoft’s offices and to my manager John Oxley’s efforts to keep me from getting too deeply entrenched within the culture. I was hired partly for my outsider’s perspective, and for me to be effective, I need to maintain some of my “outsideness”. This perspective makes me able to do or see things that a hardcore Microsoftie might not consider (such as Coffee and Code) or perceive (such as the rise of the iPhone, while Steve Ballmer said that “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share”).

Unlike religious evangelists, shamen are mediators. While an evangelist’s communication is typically one-way, from the supernatural to the people, the shaman not only speaks on behalf of the supernatural to the people to influence them, but also on behalf of people to the supernatural to influence it back. If I am only evangelizing to developers on behalf of Microsoft, I’m only doing half my job. I also need to evangelize to Microsoft on behalf of the developer community.

When I joined Microsoft, a number of my friends suggested that I’d be good at changing the company from the inside. I think that that task is better left to the people who either develop its technologies or strategy; as an Evangelist – er, Shaman – I am better positioned to change the company from the outside. Think about it: a good chunk of what makes a platform is its developer community; without it, it’s just sits there. Without their developer communities, Windows wouldn’t have become the dominant desktop system, Linux wouldn’t have become the dominant web OS and the iPhone would be another Nokia N-Gage. Developers shape the platform just as much as the platform vendor, and they do it best when they have a conduit to their platform vendor – a shaman.

For some religions, the position of shaman is also an ecological one, and as a developer evangelist so is mine. According to Wikipedia, some shamen “have a leading role in this ecological management, actively restricting hunting and fishing”. I am charged with making sure that Canada’s developer ecology is a healthy one; in fact, when I was hired, I was told that I was hired “for Canada first, and Microsoft second.”

A healthy, thriving developer ecosystem is good for the field, which in turn is good for Microsoft. As a developer who likes to participate in the community, I have an active interest in keeping the ecosystem healthy, and a Microsoft that contributes positively to that ecosystem is a good thing. The nurturing of ecosystems isn’t covered by evangelism, but it certainly falls under a shaman’s list of tasks.

And finally, the idea of eating mushrooms and rolling around the Microsoft cafeteria is intriguing. I doubt that they’d tolerate me playing my accordion while high as a kite, wearing nothing but body paint and assless chaps, rolling all over the salad bar and smothering myself with cottage cheese. It is an amusing idea, though.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s the presentation I did at WordCamp Toronto 2009 this weekend, Better Living Through Blogging, in which I talk about how taking up blogging has paid off in all sorts of ways, from relationships to career to even saving my bacon.

Some Notes About the Deck

You’ve probably suffered through presentations whose slides look something like this:

I’m not a big fan of background templates in slides, but at least this one (from one of the themes provided in PowerPoint 2007) isn’t so bad. There are worse themes I could’ve picked, such as this one:

That’s just downright ugly.

I find that a plain black background with white text works best. The plain black background is simple, doesn’t interfere with or overpower your content, and works well with all sorts of room sizes, lighting conditions, projector types, projection surfaces and so on.

Whenever possible, I avoid putting the company logo at the bottom of every slide. It’s not a fight I’m always going to win, but I do my best to convince the guardians of corporate identity that the audience won’t forget the company name if we don’t beat the audience’s head with it on every slide. I think that it detracts from the presentation by drawing attention away from the content; I think that it also reeks of branding desperation. I think it’s enough to show the logo at the start and end.

Your slides are not cue cards. The purpose of standing in front of an audience is not to read aloud a document written in point form. You’re there not only to communicate an idea, but to engage the people in the room as well; the slides are there as support. That’s why slide presentation software has “presenter mode”, where the slides are displayed on the projector and your notes are displayed on your laptop.

A Little Sample

Here’s what my audience saw instead of the “Who Am I?” slide above. I’ve included a rough paraphrase of what I said along with the slides…

“Some of you already know me, some of you think you know me, and some of you are wondering ‘who is this Microsoft Guy and why is he speaking at a Wordpress event?’. So I guess a proper introduction is in order.”

“Yes, I work for Microsoft. The Empire. I’m still new, having been working there for just over six months. I’ve had a blast so far – it’s a fun place to work, and in my particular job, they give you a wide degree of latitude.”

“As for my job, if I could pick the title, it would be…Sith Lord.”

“But the company, being what it is, prefers to give me the slightly less interesting title of Evangelista.”

“Actually, that’s not true. The title is Evangelist. It’s a relatively new kind of job in the big scheme of things, which is a combination of…”

“Super-smart hottie with programming skills and…”

“Dapper, intelligent and quick-witted communicator of ideas. I’m kind of like a marketer. But with a brain. And a soul. [Looking at wincing marketers in the audience] Oh, I kid because I love.”

“The concept of a technology evangelist was pioneered by the The Esteemed Competition over at Apple by Mike Boich, but it was Guy Kawasaki who popularized the position. He’s since gone on to do other tech-related things in Silicon Valley, but a lot of what he does can still be considered to be evangelism.”

“Microsoft also has technology evangelists. The one you probably know is Robert Scoble, who was with the company for three-ish years, and like Guy, although he doesn’t have the title or work for Microsoft anymore, a lot of what he does is still evangelism.”

“And yeah, I know the guy.”

I’d much rather see a presentation done in the style that I used rather than seeing someone simply grind through a deck of items in point form, acting as a narration service.

And Now a Question for the Audience

If I were to post a more detailed version of my presentation online, would you rather have it…

• in the form shown above, with the slides shown above what I said in text form?
• as a video, with the slides displayed in the video portion and my voice as the audio?

Let me know.

When using your company-assigned laptop to make presentations, remember to disable your pornographically-themed screensaver (and yes, the video below is not safe for work):

The Independent has a great article by former Wall Streeter Philipp Meyer titled American Excess: A Wall Street Trader Tells All. I’ve included some snippets from the article below, but you really should read the whole thing.

I didn’t fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major, most everyone else had relatives or family in banking. I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning. I didn’t care what I had to do. At Cornell University it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money.

…while derivatives, and the financial industry more broadly, had started out serving industry, by the late 1990s the situation had reversed. The Market had become a near-religious force in our culture; industry, society, and politicians all bowed down to it.

It was pretty clear what The Market didn’t like. It didn’t like being closely watched. It didn’t like rules that governed its behaviour. It didn’t like goods produced in First-World countries or workers who made high wages, with the notable exception of financial sector employees. This last point bothered me especially.

The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues – love, honor, compassion – do not actually exist.

The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.

One of the reasons we allowed the financial industry so much control over our lives, starting in the 1990s and continuing until the meltdown of 2008, is the propaganda smokescreen of The Market. This idea of the God-like Market – all-seeing, all-knowing, and beyond question – is what allows CEOs to put a few thousand people out of work while giving themselves a $40m paycheck. It’s what allows certain hedge fund managers to take home half a billion (yes – billion) in a good year, while schools and bridges fall apart.

In reality, The Market is nothing more than the people who comprise it. Access to trading markets is very tightly controlled – it is not like a shopping mall. And it is certainly not magic. It’s just people. A very small number of people, in fact.

It is crucial to realise that what motivates those people – collecting their million or hundred million dollar bonuses – has nothing to do with the job they actually perform. People used to do it for a lot less and it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates – I turned away 10 good recruits at Cornell for every one we hired.

The reason we’ve ended up in the spot we’re in today is not so much our failure to understand economics as our failure to understand human nature.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff.

It’s not that people in the City or on Wall Street are necessarily bad people, it’s just that they, like almost anyone, will do anything to keep their million or ten million dollar paycheck. They’ll creatively interpret data, they’ll understate risks, they’ll put the best spin on things. Some will lie, cheat, and steal. But most of them, like most of us, will simply resist looking at the world from any perspective other than their own. And if we are intelligent, we will keep a careful watch on them – both now and into the distant future.

[Thanks to AZSpot.net for the link!]

Photo by David Crow. Click to see the source.

A number of people who know me were concerned that I’d be a poor fit at Microsoft, but I’ve always used the “square peg in a round hole” thing as my “secret sauce”. The research cited in the Time magazine article Why the Office Oddball is Good for Business would suggest it’s a good play.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

That’s half-a-versary as in the celebration of something that took place half a year ago. It’s been half a year since I joined this organization:

…and I have to tell you, it’s been quite good.

The two things I value most about my job as Developer Evangelist for The Empire are the freedom and the ability to make a splash. The only working situation where I’ve had even more freedom and control of my destiny was back in the late 1990s at a consultancy that was just me and one other guy, and I’ve never had the reach nor the opportunities that I now enjoy as a Sith Lord.

As a mobile worker, they cover my transportation costs too.

They’ve been pretty cool with my wacky ideas, from my re-appropriation of their image as “The Empire” to the stunt at Richard Stallman’s GNU auction at CUSEC to starting Coffee and Code, a weekly happening that most companies might dismiss as an attempt to loaf on company time.

I’ve been free to inject my offbeat, earthy sense of humour into my work, from celebrating InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 to the time I made Bob Muglia – then a Senior VP, now President of the Server and Tools division — run away from me at a Los Angeles rooftop party when I serenaded him on accordion with a song about InPrivate Browsing, sung to the tune of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer:

I’m your private browser
A browser for po-orn
One-handed surfing for you…

And maybe, just maybe, I’ve either helped a software developer get some piece of information or consider using some Microsoft tool or technology. Maybe.

I’ve enjoyed my return to using Microsoft tools and tech, and there sure is plenty of that! It may take me another six months just to be able to say I’ve done a reasonable review of the stuff that I’m supposed to specialize in – the web and mobile spheres — and that’s just a piece of a much larger pie.

I relish the challenges of being an evangelist for The Empire. It’s easy to fling poop at Microsoft, and there are cases where the poop-flinging is warranted. It’s often harder to see that Microsoft is also behind some solid tech that drives our industry and is undergoing an interesting “sea change” in both its tech and its approach.

And most importantly, I enjoy the opportunities to make connections with people, both inside and outside Microsoft, from the students I met at CUSEC to developers I’ve met a various conferences and gatherings to my manager John Oxley and VP Mark Relph and especially with the Developer Evangelism team to which I belong, from:

• Christian Beauclair (who, if we were the A-Team, would make an excellent Hannibal) to
• Qixing Zheng (Face) to
• John Bristowe (oh yeah, dude, you are soooo B.A. Baracus)

…I’m very honoured to be “Howling Mad Murdock” for this A-Team.