Rob Mensching's Blog - page 32

Today, four years ago the WiX toolset was released as the first Open Source project from Microsoft. Each year I like to take a moment and look around to see where we are. Just this week, I've found two random blog entries that make me believe we're being successful.

A head cold is totally wiping me out right now but I wanted to post a few quick notes about progress on the WiX toolset.

Yesterday was April Fool's Day. Jenny's family has a long history of playing jokes on that day. My family does not. As a result, I'm not particularly good at pulling off an elaborate (or even simple) practical joke and Jenny has her guard up all day. This year was different.

So after 9 years of challenges and triumphs I have finally decided it is time to step away from Microsoft. I had a blast at Microsoft's Open Source Day 2008 (also told by John Lam) and after it all I felt like I had accomplished a lifetime's worth of achievements. It is now time to seek out new challenges.

The end of my first ever Scrum Sprint is impending. For the last three weeks (of a six week Sprint) I have been scrambling to get all the pieces of my part of the puzzle complete. Why is it a scramble instead of a nice run through the backlog? Because various pieces didn't come together well (i.e. the way I though they would) in the beginning.

After having Outlook completely "forget" to update a couple of my feed subscriptions I decided it was time to go back to RSS Bandit. Once installed I found that RSS Bandit had added a few feeds that I had long discarded.

On the day of the "great blog power outage", I entered my first year as a "thirtysomething". Jenny and I were off relaxing on the San Juan islands. It was a wonderful three day trip of doing basically nothing. It isn't very often that I have a time where the greatest goal for a day is reading a few more pages in a book of fiction. In this case, Pattern Recognition.

It hasn't been a great couple months for my uptime here.