Open Source Ambassador

Yep, that’s right. That’s my other job here at the company. This means that I participate in a set of events that have nothing to do with IronRuby as a technology, but have everything to do with IronRuby as part of a movement toward greater openness within the company.

Last week, I participated in the Microsoft Technical Summit that we held here on campus. Every year we invite a bunch of Microsoft skeptics to campus and subject them to mind conditioning engage in a dialogue with them. I talked about why we were doing Open Source, why we were doing dynamic languages in particular, and showed them a few demos of stuff that works today. It was great to get blunt feedback from folks who took time out of their lives to attend, and hopefully we did move the dial on their perceptions of what we’re up to here at the company.

I had a lot of fun talking to Adam Keys who rocked my world with his RubyConf one-man play (warning – you need to either be a Ruby programmer to really appreciate the crazy humor that this is, or be fascinated by what geeks think is funny):

On Friday, I participated in our inaugural Open Source Day internal conference at Microsoft. I was on a panel with three other folks: Rob Mensching, who did the first Open Source project at Microsoft – WiX, Shawn Burke, who runs the AJAX Control Toolkit project, and made the .NET library source code available among many other cool things, and Tom Hanrahan who runs our Linux Interoperability lab. We talked about experiences – Rob and Shawn have been at the company a long time and had a ton of fun anecdotes about what it was like to try and do Open Source at the company back in the dark ages. I contributed some stories about how we do IronRuby development and some pointers about how other product groups can think about why and how they should participate in Open Source. Tom was our elder statesman, and talked a lot about why interop is important to our customers (bottom line is that virtually all of our medium to large customers live in a heterogeneous aka non-100% Windows environment).

One thing that came out in the discussions is how we need to be better at transparency, even while developing our non-Open Source products. One of the powerful ideas of Open Source is the ability for outsiders to actively participate in the creation of products even if they never crack open the sources themselves. That’s a powerful idea, and one that I think that (at least in Developer Division – where I work) we’re in a great position to deliver on.

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I’m a huge fan of vimperator after discovering it via Zed Shaw. If you’ve internalized the vim keybindings, you’ll be surprised at how you can leverage your muscle memory while surfing the web.