There were 8 lbs. of M&Ms outside my office yesterday morning. You know what that means. Milestones like this are also good times to sit back and reflect a bit.
Work (during the day)
Windows Marketplace started off with a bang when we released Windows Vista for download. It was an amazing feeling to work for less than three months and launch something that big. It felt especially good after slogging through the previous two years to get Vista out the door.
Since that release, I spent significant amounts of time gutting and rebuilding the Windows Marketplace build and deployment system. There were a lot of engineering principles that had been ignored for a long while so it took quite a bit of effort to pay down those taxes. For the last month I've actually started designing and writing features for Windows Marketplace that will show up in the not too distant future.
There is so much cool stuff I want to do in Windows Marketplace. I look forward to getting out of engineering debt and into pure future design.
Work (during the night)
Entering escrow for WiX v2 was like letting out a huge sigh of relief. I wasn't sure what I was going to feel but not having to stare down bugs constantly has been really nice.
The WiX community continues to grow. We continue to see more hits on the web site, more downloads and more questions on the mailing lists. It's particularly cool to see commercial tools enter the MSI authoring space built on top of the WiX toolset.
I think we're also crossing into the next phase of community where the second phase of adopters are picking up the toolset. The early adopters are usually very technically savvy and willing to put up with a certain amount of pain to check out something cool. The second wave of users are usually less impressed with the technology for technology's sake and want more things "to just work". I believe satisfying the needs of that second wave of users is what pushes a technology to the next level of adoption. It's going to take us a good long while to get there with WiX v3 but we'll keep expanding the foundation and trying to make everything easier (Derek would like me to have said "easy" but I'm going to stay conservative for a while).
On top of all that work stuff, home life is good... but I'm only at the half year mark so it isn't time for reflection on that yet. <smile/>
posted @ Friday, June 29, 2007 12:09 AM