When I was in high school and old enough to drive I got a job at McDonald's. I really liked that job. I learned many life lessons there that had absolutely nothing to do with flipping hamburgers. This morning I was thinking about one of those lessons.
Halo was an integral part of the early days of the WiX Toolset. We started working at about 6:30 PM on Thursdays, took a break at 11:30 PM to play Halo for an hour or so then maybe there was more coding or maybe it was time to call it a night. It's not like that any more. In fact, I was cleaning out my Inbox this morning and came across this comic that Reid sent a couple years ago.
A while ago I started talking about culture around the WiX Toolset. I started (and ended) with turtles all the way down which was an early part of the WiX culture. A more recent addition to our culture (added in the last year or so) are the videos.
Shared stories are an important part of any culture. We have our fair share of long running stories and jokes amongst the core WiX developers. Most of these stories have some connection to typical geek culture. One of my favorite is the story about the nature of the universe and all things WiX.
Last week I met with some PMs that work on the east coast. They fly over to the west coast to visit the Microsoft mothership every couple months. Our meeting was one of many face to face meetings they try to squish into a single week before flying home.