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April 28, 2004

Looking back, looking forward

Thursday, 7:30 PM
Good weather: Outside @ K-Bar
Bad weather: Inside Keynes, but outside of K-Bar.
(In other words, not in the bar proper)

I'd like to see people turn out; we'll call it a social of sorts. Perhaps we'll do another (without an agenda), but for the moment, this will be a half-way social. I'd like to address three questions:

  1. What would you keep next year?
  2. What would you change next year?
  3. What would you throw away next year?

I've actually asked this question at the end of most every class I've ever taught, so it isn't new. There is no criticism (of the course) that I can't handle; I (and Brad and Christian) only want to see this enterprise improve, so be honest.

If you can't make Thursday evening (revision, etc.), then leave a note here, or write me personally. I'm interested in what you have to say. In particular, those who haven't shown up in the last few weeks of CSCS.

If I don't see you in the near future, good luck with exams, and see you next year!

Posted by mjadud at 08:36 AM

Chris Pratley, Group Program Manager

Things have been quiet lately; too quiet.

To start, you might be interested in reading Chris Pratley's weblog; he's the group program manager for the Office team. In other words, he overseas the work on all MS Office products.

I know some of you are pretty Anti-Evil-Empire, but the fact is that Microsoft achieves some rather stunning feats of engineering management (among other things). The Win 2000 team had some ridiculously large number of engineers working on it (2000 or more?), and they manage millions of lines of code. Being the ringleader of that kind of circus implies that you might find some interesting insights along the way.

The writings of Joel Spolsky are also interesting; he's an ex-Microsoftie who left to start his own software firm. He almost always talks sense, which means you can almost always pay attention and learn something about software development and management practice.

Posted by mjadud at 08:30 AM