What C9 has meant to me... | The Coffeehouse

JKelley
Is it sad that my badge picture is one of the best ones I have of myself?

Time for yet another C9 Birthday thread. Looking at my profile, it looks like I created my profile to be able to post about a week after the site first launched. If I think back over where I was 5 years ago, and the role that Channel 9 played in getting me to where I am today it's amazing.

When Channel 9 launched I was a software developer at a small company in NY state. At the time I had my heart set on trying to go join Pixar and do computer animation related work. Microsoft was about the farthest from my mind in terms of my career path, even though I used the MS platform every day at work. Then I started seeing some information about this new site. It was going to let us see inside the "cockpit" of Microsoft. What the heck was this?

Even though I wasn't interested in working here yet, I was interested to see HOW Microsoft made software. What were the processes, what were the roles of everyone on the team? I hoped that it would show us how we could improve our own practices at my job. Somewhere along the way some videos about the interviewing process got posted. Between that, and seeing the way that the people in these videos LOVED the work they were doing, I started to think maybe I should try it.

Fast forward to 2006 and I made the decision to apply, and I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to become a PM on a small team that made Power Toys for Visual Studio. Open Source software. At Microsoft. Working with the community. It wasn't what I would have thought I would end up doing, but it was a great opportunity so I took it. Since then my team got bounced around a bit, and eventually disbanded. Along the way I got to work on building a connection between the Microsoft product teams and the MSDN Forums, and then later on focusing on ALL the support forums (MSDN, TechNet, Expression, a little bit of Answers). Now I'm working on MSDN and TechNet blogs, as well as looking at what projects we can do to make our sites better.

We got cake today for C9's birthday, and that was awesome. Great thanks to Charles and Jeff and everyone else who was there, or who has come and gone. Channel 9 holds the nugget of what I think is special about Microsoft and I'm happy I could be a part of it, from within and without.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY C9!

Charles
Welcome Change

Wow. Thank you, Jeremy. It was great to see you, Dahat, and PaoloM at the cake eating yesterday.

Long live Niner nation!!
C

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Charles

#Apr 7th @ 8:27 AM

The cake was, indeed, moist and delicious. And, for once, not a lie Smiley

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

In reply to PaoloM

#Apr 7th @ 8:37 AM

If I had known the nine guy tasted this good, I would have devoured him years ago!

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Sampy

#Apr 7th @ 9:08 AM

I may try the one i have at home as a snack. Like, in an emergency situation, you can have a cake always at your disposal...

That Charles and that Jeff are really thoughtful guys, ready for any situation... Smiley

androidi

I've wanted to find a way to submit feedback to the msdn blog team with this feedback: I haven't created blogs/technet msdn accounts in all these years of posting anonymously there since I've expected since day one to be able to sign in same way as here, with one account for all MS community sites. And when I saw the talks about CardSpace/Infocards and identity federation I was all sold but after seeing how vague the material about implementing it was I realized this is ain't going to be popular any time soon and these days I'm starting to wonder whether the whole idea is good in the first place. There are some good things about the it but all those secured round trips doing the authentication and various random problems seen with just the Live login into Channel 9 suggests it might be a long way to go and still only see implementation by only some entities and not every random php forum which is where I want the easy registration in (and inbuilt to IE and OS).

I guess my new feedback is this: It seems there won't ever be a day when everyone is going to support cardspace, since the blogs.msdn.com hasn't and that was the first site I expected to support it. So MS needs to work a way into IE and the OS that makes registering on sites that do not support it easier without having to manually type the info in. Now I realize that for some sites it already sort of works, where you can press down arrow or click the field and get previously entered form info, however that's very unreliable and a mess if you have more than one nickname in various forums. Maybe some kind of super simple to implement registration data submission xml based schema/format for non-secure purposes would fill this gap and allow the data be filled from the local identity card data with a warning box that this site does not support the id federation and instead a random password will be generated (turning cardspace+IE partially into password management system built to the OS).