Videos during work hours only? | The Coffeehouse

sparky

I don't know about everyone else, but I tend to look at this site more while I'm at home. It would be nice if some videos were posted off-hours.

Eddie

Does it matter when they are posted, as long as they are avaiable for a few days, you can check them when you have time..

sparky

Valid point, but I tend to watch them all after work, all at once. (or one after another if you want to be technical). That leaves the rest of the evening with no videos!

The channel9 staff is expecting too much of us if they think we should voluntarily rate-limit our video consumption.

Spar
Everythings Eventual!!

Yeah.. but when us after work? I live in Europe and I think I'm 8 hours ahead of the server there.. It's 8:24 am here now and probably midnight where you are...

How about people living in Australia... The internet is global.. as are MS users... .. Smiley

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Do you want more videos? Or just have them delivered at a different time?

If more, how many can you keep up with?

4?
8?
10 per day?

Actually, we wouldn't be able to keep up with 10 per day, but four is probably doable. Do you think we should deliver the same number every day?

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

I should note that I like aiming at two videos a day. It's hard to keep the quality up if you want to push more than that (given the size of the team and the efficiencies we have right now of doing interviews, editing them, compressing them, and getting them up).

Glad to see people are enjoying the videos.

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

the current rate at the moment is perfect in my mind.

Jorriss
Don't piss-off the Ibis.

More, more, more!! I think the videos have been an excellent way for me, the humble developer, to gain insight into the brain of a MS employee. I've gathered a lot of insight seeing what it takes to put together the products that I use everyday. It also personalizes the company in a way that I haven't seen before. No longer do I think that MS this huge juggernaut that trounces the completion and forces me to use their products. I now see MS as a group of people doing what they love for the benefit of the customer. So keep up the videos...its working.

sparky

10 a day is probably pushing it. I'd say 4-8 is a good range, but not if the quality has to suffer. Smiley

The current videos seem to have very broad coverage of some topics.
Eventually, I imagine that you will cover most of the bases, and you'll have to take a different approach. (It's only possible to do so many "tell us about your day" interviews, before they all start sounding the same.)

Do you have any plans with respect to that? I suppose Microsoft may be a big enough place where you could keep doing broad interviews indefinitely, without a lot of redundancy.

sparky

Spar wrote:
Yeah.. but when us after work? I live in Europe and I think I'm 8 hours ahead of the server there.. It's 8:24 am here now and probably midnight where you are...

Ahh, but I was siggesting that the videos be spread out more, over the course of the entire day.
Your statements support my point of view. If the videos are spread out, then it would seem normal regardless of your time-zone.

clint_hill
C-x,C-f

Man the quanity of the videos aren't the issue. I think two a day is great. Maybe it is just me, but I love seeing code. Can we get the interviewees to show some code. Put their money where there mouth is?

lenn
Fo' Shizzle

This is a great thread. Thanks for all of the feedback. I would be curious to know if you think we could show code well in a small video window at low bit rates. We struggle with this when doing things like TechEd and PDC webcasts. We end up putting high res stuff on DVD. Would you be willing to download higher qualuty videos if we could show code?

clint_hill
C-x,C-f

I thought about that after I posted. That is a tough call. But how about a more midieval approach. Get a projector up on the wall and video that? With laptops and projector quality going up it couldn't be that bad. The monitor might be a bad call to video, but the project might do the trick.

Now this means a little more preparation, but I am sure you guys have tons of time right?

The reason I mention the code is I watched a MSDN TV episode with Chris and Don talking about xaml "XAML Beyond the basics". Now the content was predictable. What wasn't however is the fact that Chris (or maybe Don) was using Emacs.

I had always and now incorrectly assumed that at MSFT VS was dogfood. But clearly here I saw Emacs. This made me very interested so much so that I downloaded Emacs again and started over with it. Hadn't done this since school.

lenn
Fo' Shizzle

We will experiment with this and see what we can come up with.

As for the tons of time comment ... yeah ... right Wink

Don is the emacs guy. Most developers in the company use VS for their work, the overwhelming majority. But there are a few hardcore programmers who code without a net at Microsoft. Don is one of them. At PDC he did all of his demos in emacs and Jim Allchin came out and coded in Vi. It was a sight to see ... but I am not going back to those days ... no way.

clint_hill
C-x,C-f

lenn wrote:
It was a sight to see ... but I am not going back to those days ... no way.

Ditto. I love the idea of being able to open emacs up -> code -> compile -> run an app, just because I can. It makes me feel like I still got it.

I thought more about the projector idea and I came to the conclusion, it would be pretty cool. Make the interview a two part type of thing. <underbreathe>I know this is starting to reak of MSDN TV, but I really like that</underbreathe> First part is the intro to the content, second part is the code. But more important to me is if the Eric or Bill Hill types would walk us through what they do when they sit down to do work. Not answering emails or jotting down meeting notes (keep that stuff away from me) but when they roll up their sleeves and peck at the keyboard.

Call it stalking, I would love to see how they work.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

We have some video like this coming up in a bit from the Visual Basic team. We'll see how well it works.