6 posts tagged “microsoft”
This event may just be enough to bring me out of a two month blogging wilderness:
My officemate, Hui, is discussing something with a colleague, Joe - I'm not really listening because I'm working with my headphones on. I happen to turn around and see Joe fiddling with the Rubik's cube on Hui's desk as he's talking. Well ok, he's not fiddling, he's solving it. By the end of the 5 minute conversation, the Rubik's cube is solved. Last time I turned around, that thing was mighty messed up.
Me (amazed): Er... Joe. Did you just solve that Rubix cube.
Joe (deadpan): Yes.
Working at Microsoft can be pretty humbling.
It's been a while since my last entry; I haven't really been in a writing mood, but I thought I'd post something as a sign of my continued existence. Some things that have been happening:
Australia
I went home for a couple of weeks. It was great as usual. Even though so much has changed since I moved away, it takes about 40 seconds for me to become completely immersed in life at home again. Except for the light switches being the other way around and driving on the left and things like that, which took a little longer. Funny how the superficial differences take longer to get used to than big things like being with family again.
I squeezed in the usual catchups with friends, and as usual most of them felt too short for either party to do any more than skim the surface of what's rolling arouund each other's heads these days. I guess that's part of life; drifting away from people to such an extent that although you trust each other to talk about things, you have so little time with each other, and so rarely, that to dive headfirst into such topics feels like plunging into cold water and so you don't do it.
My parents organised a family trip to South Australia for four days, which was amazing. The highlight was definitely Kangaroo Island, which is like a huge wild menagerie of all different sorts of animals. Growing up in Australia I stopped seeing the novelty of kangaroos or koalas a long time ago, but seeing them just casually doing their thing in the wild really brought back some excitement to the tired stereotypes in my head. It also helps that Kangaroo Island is stupendously beautiful, with wild jagged coastal cliffs, pristine beaches, iconic mallee scrub, green meadows, and random sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. The other places we visited on the trip were the Barossa Valley for some wine tasting, and a tiny bit of Adelaide (unfortunately, we didn't get to walk around and explore very much).
Work
Work has been busy, have been staying past 7 most nights (although the hours that Jon puts in make me feel lazy). Some interesting news from this week is that I will have someone reporting directly to me from next week onwards. It'll be a challenge juggling that with my own work, but I guess it's a good opportunity to figure out whether I like the whole management track or not.
Oot and aboot
There are several travel plans in the works: going to New York for a few days next week, visiting Sam in Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) a week or two after that, and Thanksgiving in Whistler. By all accounts the snow is bucketing down in the mountains, so it's likely we will have some fully sick pow, bro.
Music
Have been to some decent shows recently: Fujiya and Miyagi last week (pretty good), Great Lake Swimmers (even better), Patrick Wolf (outstanding). I also brought back the 2 latest Cat Empire albums from Australia, Cities (more of an experimental album) and So Many Nights (a mainstream release). The former is outstanding and hard to stop listening to on repeat; the latter was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. New album means touring though, so hopefully they will make it to Sea'le.
My friend Punit managed to get himself in the newspaper: http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070918/BUSINESS01/70918108
This may be my biggest claim to fame since going to the same high school as Nikki Webster.
It's a little scary what a privileged life I get to lead these days working at Microsoft. I wonder at times what I've really done to deserve all of this. I was thinking about it today after this conversation:
Sean [4:57 PM]:
[[Removing proprietary info]] is so broken that I have nothing to do but plan fun stuff...*
Urmila [4:58 PM]:
haha oh no ;)
Urmila [4:58 PM]:
you do realise though
Urmila [4:58 PM]:
if they stay broken for long enough, you can come to whistler with us!**
Sean [4:58 PM]:
yes, but then I don't get to go to china and I've already bought the Lonely Planets!
Sean [4:59 PM]:
Going to china for free is pretty attractive too.
Urmila [4:59 PM]:
this is true
Sean [4:59 PM]:
it's kind of sickening how lucky we are... I either go to china for free or go to whistler
Urmila [5:00 PM]:
when you put it like that... wow.
*Project that needs to be unmunted before Sean can do his all-expenses-paid stint at the MSFT development centre in China
**I am planning a trip to Whistler, but Sean will probably be overseas by then
It's been a while since my last post. Life has been busy, but not in a particularly blogworthy way (although given my talent for rambling, this will probably become a pretty substantial post anyway).
Work
Work is really keeping me head down, bum up. For this release our team is trying the Scrum model,
which seems to have its good and bad points, like any development model
I suppose. At first I have to say I was sceptical - I mean, putting up
gold stars every day for each hour you worked on a particular task, and
smiley faces for overtime hours? And standing in a circle every morning
to say what you'd done the day before, like Show and Tell time in Year
1? It all sounded a little primary school and gimmicky.
In practice though, I've come to like the close interaction this approach affords with the other people on my team. Something I really hated when I was brand new at MSFT (especially after working in a place as open-plan and informal as EDI) was the fact that from a newcomer's perspective, it seemed like everyone was holed up looking busy and important in their offices, which made it incredibly intimidating to approach them as a n00b with absolutely no prior knowledge whatsoever. I ended up relying heavily on my mentor to learn things, and to be perfectly honest, sometimes having to bluff my way through stuff I didn't really know about.
I've even come to appreciate the daily standup and putting up my stars - when you have to account for your time like that, you really start to think about what you're doing with your day. It forces you to set short-term goals and makes you a lot more focused and productive, which is satisfying, and if something is holding you up, you have a forum for people to hear about it and help you out.
There is other fun stuff, like less documentation, which I don't think anyone is unhappy about (except maybe our PM who published a 12 page long one-pager the other day, god bless him), and the fact that we can actually keep reevaluating during the sprint to make sure our goals are achievable and people aren't working themselves to death. But I think that's enough about work for one post.
Getting off my ass
I've been getting back into a regular gym routine, which can only be a
good thing. My current philosophy is to drag myself there whether I
feel like it or not, and just do whatever I feel capable of doing. If I
feel fine, I run. If my knee is dodgy (which it seems to get these days
after 2 consecutive days of running) or my stomach hurts, I bike or
walk. If I don't feel like being inside, I put on a jumper and gloves
and run outside. The thing is, once I'm there, it's all good, the
endorphins kick in, it's a natural high. The hardest part is lugging my
lazy ass there, so now I take my gear to the office with me and go
straight to the gym after work - because if I come home in between, I
end up changing into my PJ's about 50% of the time instead of my
trackies.
Moving
It is confirmed: I will be moving in with Astha in about 2 months. Seattle. W00t.
Music
At the moment, a LOT of Cat Empire, the Cure, and, surprisingly, John Mayer's new album, Continuum.
I haven't been able to stand his old albums for a while now - I think I
grossly overplayed them in my fangirl stage - but this new one is great
- full of the infectious hooks, liquid groove, amazing guitar work and
thoughtful lyrics you would expect from John Mayer, and a little
something extra that you wouldn't: protest songs. For someone who
listens to and overanalyses song lyrics to the point of obsession, the
broadening of his subject material really made the difference for me -
it makes this album seem so much less mawkish than his previous
efforts. I can't stop listening to it. Kudos.
Books
I'm also in the middle of The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, which Sam mentioned to me sometime in high school, but I never got around to reading. I saw the movie last year and loved it, so when I saw the book on sale at Half Price Books (one of my favourite haunts) I picked it up. Enjoying it so far, and noting all the differences.
The other books on my to-read list:
- Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce - I've been in the middle of this one for about 9 months now - I get on a roll of about 50 pages and then just forget about it somehow. I got about two-thirds of the way through on the plane back from Sydney last year - I really need to pick it up again before I forget everything I've read.
- Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom - another book I'd been keeping an eye out for and finally found at Half Price Books last week. I read just the preface today, and it took me about 20 minutes. The text is small, the language is academic, this is going to be a dense one. But it did win the Nobel Prize for Economics, so it should be worth the effort.
- Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything - this has been on my list for months, and it always seems to get superceded by something else - Bryson is so readable, I know I can pick this one up anytime, anywhere. I would like to finish it though.
- Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma - Tom raved about this one for ages and then ended up buying me a copy to make sure I read it. I haven't opened it yet, but I will, cos Tom has impeccable reading taste (he recommended The Tipping Point too).
- All the Harry Potters - I need to reread them before the
final book comes out on the 21st of July. I'm terribly excited, but at
the same time it's sad somehow, knowing that it's all going to be over
soon. I can't explain why.
P.S. Note I didn't mention skiing in this post once. Oh... whoops.
Today is a momentous day.
The apple juice can sculpture on my desk at work has finally reached perfect 6x6x6 pyramidal form. 56 cans, the ancient Egyptians would be proud. It's all about setting noble goals in life, folks. Stay tuned for the 7x7x7 edition (may take a few months - I don't drink *that* much juice.)
On a less frivolous note, a lot has actually been happening at work. Our team just started on the next major release of our product, Subscription and Commerce Service (SCS) 7.0. I don't talk about work much here, so here's a quick summary. My team, the Subscription and Commerce Group (SCG), is responsible for Microsoft's online monetisation platform. In plain English that means that we provide e-commerce services like credit card processing, subscription management, and so on, that other groups in Windows Live (formerly MSN), as well as our external partners, can plug into to sell things online.
Anyway, after spending a year working on a very obscure backend feature called Payment Gateway (namely the interface between our system and various banks), I'm happy to report that for our next release I'm going to be working on possibly the most visible feature our team owns - Microsoft Points. Ok, so it isn't by any means as instantly recognisable as Office or Windows, but most people who are active Xbox gamers, or own a Zune, or run their small business websites over Office Live, regularly interact with my feature. Basically Points are a digital currency you can use to buy things like songs for your Zune, premium content for your Xbox like extra levels, weapons, and so on.
It's really motivating to work on something which my friends are interacting with (albeit unknowingly) on a daily basis. My neighbour Thejas, who is addicted to his Xbox and whose TV speakers regularly shake our common wall with the rumblings and explosions of Gears of War, was pumped when I told him that I now work on Points. The guy probably spends half his salary on Points, god bless him.
It's also pretty cool to think about all the possibilities of combining our features with the other interesting stuff that's going on in MSFT. For example, late last year another group in Microsoft shipped XNA, a toolkit that anyone can use to develop games for Windows or the Xbox. Combining this with the Points world, could we see a whole new marketplace emerge for Xbox enthusiasts to upload and sell content they've created themselves to other users? Exciting stuff :)
I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about in regards to what we're working on, but there are some interesting things in the works, and with all the MSFT head honchos pushing the "software as a service" doctrine these days, it looks like our team's work is only going to become more important to Microsoft as a whole. Even the Economist is talking about it.
Anyway, enough about work. In other news, I have to find a new place to live. My lease runs out soon, and I've been trawling online classifieds for apartments to rent downtown. Since I seem to spend so much of my spare time in Seattle or wishing I was in Seattle, it makes sense to move there. In an interesting twist of fate, Astha's roommate is taking off to India, possibly for good, and therefore has to move out of their apartment, and Astha asked if I would consider taking her place.
The arrangement does have the potential to be awesome - Astha is a champion and we get on great, so it could be a lot of fun. Her apartment is also gorgeous, in a ridiculously convenient location, and will save me a hell of a lot of money compared to living alone. There is of course the question of whether the fun will continue when we have to be in each other's faces 7 days a week, and how the hell all my stuff, which currently takes up a whole apartment, is going to get consolidated to a single room. A lot of stuff will obviously have to go into storage, but the main issue is, I have gotten used to having my own space, and it will take a bit of adjusting to. I do think it's worth a try though, and the fact that it's a month-by-month arrangement is good - if it really doesn't work out, we're not stuck in a lease.
Some other tidbits:
- My new skis are really doing wonders for me. They are so light and manoeuvrable, I am charging down runs I used to be scared of. I hope we get some good powder in the mountains this week, I want to hit up a black diamond. (Best case scenario: I won't die.)
- Nando's has landed in Seattle. Hallelujah. Hot on its heels - Baker's Delight.
- This is hilarious.
