What I'm doing these days

  • Article

Gee, this blog has been pretty quiet. Why? Could I have lost interest in the connection with all the C# developers in the world? No!

My responsibilities have drifted somewhat, to areas that make less sense to blog about.

Dev Lead

I'm the development lead for the C# editor, which means that my team creates C# Refactorings, formatting, intellisense, colorization, etc. That's where the most interesting blogging comes from.

  • How do you write your code?  
  • How does this feature suit you?  
  • Here's how we fixed this bug.  
  • Here's an idea for a way to write some cool code.

“Box” Dev

But I'm also responsible for a chunk of the operations of the C# Product Unit ("VCSPU"). As we get closer to shipping Beta 2, I spend more & more of my time on these areas. That means things like:

  • Incoming triage for the C# editor and the debugger.
  • Setting the "bug bar" for VCSPU
  • Applying the bug bar to VCSPU bugs, as the bar changes over time
  • Looking for any risks that could cause us to miss goals.
  • Bean counting:
    • how many bugs do we have?
    • How many do we expect to find in the next weeks?
    • How many of those do we think we'll fix?
    • How quickly are we fixing bugs?
    • When will we be ready to ship?
  • Reporting status / plans / progress to all the devs in VCSPU
  • Increasing or reducing pressure on the VCSPU dev team, to balance productivity, morale, and quality of work

I do this as the representative of VCSPU Dev, in concert with a rep from QA (Kartik) and PM (Shaykat).

Starting Monday, we enter VCSPU Ask Mode. This means we meet every day to talk about each of the bugs we’re thinking about fixing, to make the final decision on each one.

Ask Mode forces everyone to start thinking about shipping the product (in this case, Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2). It helps us get serious & raise the bar. Because every bug now takes a bunch more time to process, we fix fewer bugs, effectively raising the bar even further.

I imagine that talking about all the details of this process is much less interesting to my readers than the wild ideas that you’re used to hearing here.

Checkin process

I’m also responsible for the VCSPU checkin process. We use automated tools to build & verify every code change. We have racks of hardware running various automated tests on every checkin. It helps keep the daily build quality high, and helps the devs avoid the tedium of manual verification.

I don’t spend much time on it these days, as I’ve managed to delegate it through several layers (Kevin -> Abhijit -> Tom). Again, it’s not too exciting to blog about.

Reviews

It’s performance review time. In the winter/spring we focus primarily on career development, and less on actually performance evaluation. Each of my reports deserves the best work from me they can get. I need to spend a bunch of time talking to each of them about their performance, their career goals, and what we’re doing to help them grow. I also want to spend a lot of time talking to their peers to get feedback that helps them further improve.

This is perhaps a bit more interesting to blog about, but much of it is personal & confidential, so my fingers are sealed.

Personal

I’m exploring some new foods. Cultured, fermented, and natural foods. I’m also continuing on my quest for simplicity. While it may be interesting, it all appears on my personal blog, not here.

Future

As you can see, I’m pretty busy with a lot of stuff that just doesn’t seem to make sense to blog. But that should change in a couple months. We’ll probably start dreaming big, and bringing those dreams to blogs. I also hope to get my hands dirty with some code again, which means more nutty ideas about ways to write the stuff.

Stay tuned.