Hello

You’ll be seeing some more posts from me here soon so wanted to quickly say hi. My name is Martin Woodward and I’ve just moved over to work on CodePlex team here in Microsoft as the PM. I’ve been part of the CodePlex community since May 2006 (3 years before I started here at Microsoft) so it’s very bizarre to be come work behind the curtain. Previous to coming to the CodePlex team I worked on the Git support in TFS and Visual Studio as well as working on Team Explorer Everywhere – the Eclipse and Cross-platform client to TFS. I’ve been and continue to be a contributor or maintainer on various open source projects around the internets, doing some fun things in various different languages. In fact the commit that I’m most proud of in an open source project  isn’t actually one that is hosted on CodePlex at all - it was just a small bit of code I knocked up as a weekend project and then contributed to the PDE project in Eclipse. Basically it enabled some Java code to rewrite the eclipse.exe launcher on 64-bit versions of Windows at a binary level, injecting a custom icon as part of a Java based build process. It was just a small fix to an arcane bit of code that manipulated the Portable Executable file format at a binary level in Windows. This was just a raindrop in an ocean of code written that day. Yet because I took 5 minutes to attach the patch to a bug report the code has lived on for years and is still being used by organizations all over the planet, and beyond (NASA use PDE based tooling when dealing with nuclear powered, laser toting robots in outer space – how cool is that!?! )

I normally work remote from a field in rural Northern Ireland but have been in the US visiting the office this week as you can see in the picture (yes despite the site rebrand I was glad to see we still have that flag). I’ve been getting up to speed with the CodePlex codebase and the architecture of the servers behind the site and I was just part of my first CodePlex deployment that included some of my own minor changes. I’m looking forward to doing some more substantial changes in the future. More importantly I get to do my own little bit to work with others who are supporting the open source community to be awesome. Exciting times ahead, but in the meantime if you have feedback then please do not hesitate to create an issue on the CodePlex site or ping me direct @martinwoodward.