Notes from the Empire
Jan10
Tomorrow will be my last day at Microsoft. I am retiring. As yet, I have no intention of looking for another job. I do have a lot of material saved up that I will be adding to this blog over the next few weeks. If anyone is interested in my personal plans and reasons, you can check my personal blog.
Oct29
MicroSoft sent the Developer Division software architects to a meeting in the Napa Valley. I’ve described the resort in a personal blog entry. This entry is to talk about the professional aspects.
Sun used to send the senior technical people on technical conferences, and they ranged from great to deadly. This one was pretty much in the middle. The good part was meeting my peers, learning about what they are doing and what’s going on elsewhere in the company. The best part was just talking with them, and I wish we had had more time to do it.
One interesting thing was meeting people whom I hadn’t seen for decades. Somehow, MS has gathered up lots of the top people in the programming tools industry. We talked about why, and we all told pretty much the same story. If you want to work on tools, and particularly if you want to do something innovative, MS is almost the only game in town. The computer manufacturers aren’t investing much in tools, and the few third-party tools vendors are either in very small niches or barely hanging on. Some people blame it on open source. I think it’s not so obvious.
There were absolutely silly “team building” exercises, like croquet and wine blending contests, and I wish they had just skipped them. I sat out the croquet (I have a bad foot) but had some very interesting conversations sitting around watching them. Why not just schedule conversation time? The wine blending was the sort of entertainment best enjoyed after drinking a significant amount of the product.
Then there were the sessions when we were supposed to talk about the “pressing problems” that we each had. We decided on a few to discuss, then broke up into small groups. Now, these problems have been vexing the industry for a long time. You know, questions like “How should we support multithreaded computation in a programming language.” Do they really expect a breakthrough in an hour? There were none; it was a waste of time. It reminded me of one of the Sun meetings when the Sun Sigma crew split us up into groups ad ordered us to “think outside the box”. They seem to expect magic to occur.
Finally there was the obligatory business methodology consultant. The less said about him the better. His book is going straight to the library book sale. I admit I have a slightly guilty conscious about that. Perhaps I should destroy it instead, so no one will be led astray.
So we had the good, the bad, and the decidedly ugly. delivered in a beautiful setting. There were some interesting discussions, I’ll have to find out what it’s OK to talk about before I write about them.
Oct20
I’m now well established at MicroSoft, and felt like starting up a professional blog again. I’ve moved some posts from my blog at Sun to provide some context.
Some people like to call MicroSoft the “Evil Empire”. Actually, it’s no more evil than any other large company, but it is most definitely an empire, and I’ve been amused to discover just how much of an empire it is. Hence the subtitle.
I haven’t had time to do anything interesting yet, like making it look pretty or adding interesting links. In fact, just getting the blog up has taken up most of tonight, so I’ll get to that later.
Jul28
This is my last day at Sun, and it’s with truly mixed feelings that I say goodbye. It’s been a great 13 years.
This blog never got going as well as I hoped. We got busy putting together new plans and a proposal for the future HPCS project, and though there was lots of interesting stuff, I couldn’t write about any of it! I didn’t have the time or energy to make stuff up just to post to the blog. Besides, I think that sort of defeats the purpose of a log.
I’m going to be working for MicroSoft at a new group aimed at multi-threading tools and compilers, possibly moving to low-end HPC. I don’t know what MS’s blog policy will be, but I’ll find out. When and if that gets going, I’ll write about it in my personal blog, which up to now has been aimed strictly at family and friends.
I wish Sun and all of my friends there the very best, and I hope to see many of you over the next few years.
Jan31
I showed a couple of slides from a PGAS conference below, but today I just got a real treat. It’s a dvd with videos of the conference plus some very interesting animations. This is an animation of a simulation of a hummingbird implemented using UPC (Unified Parallel C), a PGAS language. It’s an alternative to using MPI for cluster computing, and many find its higher-level communications easer to use than MPI. The video of the talk should give you an idea what is happening here. I’ve loaded these videos onto my own web server, since Sun won’t let us load such large objects here. The animation is 20 MB and the talk is 65 MB. I may be forced to take them down one day, but for now, enjoy. Oh, you might want to download them before viewing.