What it's like so far on the OCS core team

Some time ago I wrote about how I moved from the Speech Server team to the OCS core team.  Now that I have been on the team for some time, I thought I'd give random thoughts about my perceptions thus far to those on the outside.

First, it is a much larger team in several respects.  Firstly, there are simply more people on this team than my last one.  Secondly, because what we do affects a number of other teams we often have to coordinate with them, meaning we need to know an even larger number of people.  I am still learning a lot of names and it will be some time before I am comfortable.  This should improve next week though when I will move offices to be with my new team.

Meetings - on my old team decisions could be made in meetings with a handful of people.  In the new team this very often requires a full conference room.  Right now, as we try to sort everything out that we will do, it can be tricky figuring out who owns what.

Change - in a lot of ways it is fun being on the cutting edge of technology.  Imagine that you need to do something and are told - "well, there's an initiative going on that will completely change how you go about this. There will be this interface that will do this and this, but we still haven't figured out how that will work. By the way, we're not sure when this will be built and for the upcoming version it may not be there so make sure to design in a way that we don't depend on it."

Obviously I cannot comment on what will be in our next versions of OCS, nor can I mention anything like ship dates or version specifics.  I can say that I have seen some very strong concepts that will dramatically improve and extend our product.  With most of these concepts, the question is more when, not if, they will be built.