Personal Update
Yesterday I took the day off. By that I mean I slept until about one in the afternoon, woke up to eat something, played some XBox360 and went to bed around ten at night. When I first started at Microsoft when I used to work a lot. I'd take every third Sunday off or something like that. Yesterday felt like one of those Sundays.
I have been working a lot for the last two months. Monday through Saturday often 7 AM (if I work out) or 9 AM (if I don’t) to 7 PM. On Thursdays I stay out until around 3 AM working on the WiX toolset. When Jenny was gone for a week in January to visit family I got back on my “early days at Microsoft schedule” of around 20 hours that causes my sleep schedule to rotate to a point where I actually go nocturnal before returning diurnal a day or so later.
Somehow Jenny has put up with it. It helps that she works Saturday’s and I only go nocturnal when she’s not around for a few days on end. I also make it home in time for dinner almost always. Also we can see the light at the end of the tunnel (this month) and I’m pretty sure it isn’t a train.
So why have I been working so hard? Well, first it was the release of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows Marketplace. One day maybe I’ll take the time to write down the story of how that all came to be. The whole event has been very encouraging to me after my time in COSD.
The second that I’ve been working so hard on is a completely rewrite of the build and deployment system for Windows Marketplace. The previous systems were very human intensive which means they were slower and more error prone than an automated system could be. For example, I’ve been able to get average build time of 1.25 hours down to under 10 minutes. The deployment times dropped from 2 hours (when there were no mistakes by humans in a very long list of steps for humans to take) to approximately 2 minutes. Most importantly I’m making everything a “two button system”. One button builds. The second button deploys. Literally.
The new build and deployment system will be used to rollout Windows Marketplace at the end of the month assuming Zac and I don’t fall on our face somewhere in the next week. If you see the site down at the end of the month then you’ll know who’s fault it is.
Finally, I’m making a change to my blogging ways. A long time ago I mentioned I was going to start addressing comments the way I saw Scoble doing it. That worked for me. However, I’ve been trying to do blog entry’s the way Raymond does it; only one (maybe two) per day. The problem is that I don’t write a bunch of blog entries up front and have a system for distributing them out one by one day by day. So, I’m switching to a new scheme that I’ve seen Dare use. I’ll write when I have time and probably post two to four blog entries of various size.
Why has it taken me so long to realize that I one blog a day wasn’t the model for me? I don’t know. I think I maybe ascribed too tightly to the guidance that posting regularly was important for a blog. Ironically, trying posting regularly just made get further behind is sharing all the blog entries I have to write (I literally have a folder with 95 items in it). Anyway, I have to start the day and get off to a birthday party for one of my cousins.
Keep coding, I’ll be at it again Monday.