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This Space Was Intentionaly Left BlankJuly 07 Parade Time!The 4th of July has just gone by in the US, being the first Independance Day i've spent in the US it's been interesting, firstly work grinds to halt for the whole week with people either taking hokiday time or "working from home" secondly the event causes a whole spate of parades and patritism. Not to mention the odd quizical American asking if we celebrate Indepenace Day in the UK, one can only assume they thought we had to have indpendance from someone, afterall if we celebrated the independance of every former colony we would have more holidays a year than France ;-). Alas the closest we get is Guy Fawkes night and even that invovles very litle flag waving however over here it is all about the parade. Anyhow me and John went to see the Kirkland parade complete with a militaty fly over, which turned out to be 1 coast guard helicopter. The parade itself went on for 2hours and included everything from vets, to the 1982 little league champs to boats complete with skantly glad models on a boat advertising a beauty salon. Unfortuntley I didn't bring my camera and John's ran out of batteries near the the begining. But if you could just imagine lots of people on a sidewalk waving small American flags that would pretty much be it. June 24 Popfly On PCWorld Watchout ListWell someone seems to like Popfly, someone other than the people who share the same hallway as me ;-), we ended up top on PC Worlds websites to watch list http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132787-page,2-c,sites/article.html the year to come will be indeed an interesting one for Popfly.
Anyway, back to coding the commenting features. June 14 Updates to PopflyIt's about a month since we announced Popfly and today we just did our first update which includes a 148 bugs fixed :-) Not bugs closed by design or dupes but 148 bugs fixed. Yay! :-) There is even some new features like auto async, suggest a block and the console. There is also a few new blocks:
*All the live blocks are courtesy of Ian Hollier on the Live Search team, who did an awesome job and now Popfly actually has some Live blocks :-)
So let the spot the spelling mistakes game begin! May 24 f8Back in San Franisco for f8, the launch of the Facebook developer platform. Good keynote from their CEO we even got a mention :). Was kind of interesting to see Microsoft talked about in a neutral/positive light and for Silverlight to be talked about next to flash.
It's all about the social and i don't mean Zune. May 20 Us and SlashdotWe kind of made it onto Slashdot I’ve been a stalker there for a long time, normally just to read the hilarious comments. This time around it's amazing to see how off base things are. Firstly our manager/dev ratio, sure if you go by our job titles we have 9 managers... Which would mean each dev would need 2 or more managers. Surprisingly enough this isn't the case. It turns out that most of the program managers on the team (5) actually do dev work, ops work, user outreach or in the case of Wes spend most of their time on another product, VS Express. Technically we have 3 managers, a GPM, an engineering manager and a product unit manager (the boss). Secondly, we do struggle for resources, sure MS has bazillions in the bank but that doesn't mean our team does. We have to convince our GMs and VPs that they should spend money on buying things like servers for us, it's much like a startup we have to convince them that Popfly will help achieve their business goals. Thirdly, on browser support we test the following platforms: IE6 (XP only!), IE 7 (XP, Vista), FF 2.0 (Mac OS X) We have one test engineer so adding automated or manual tests for browsers that "should" be supported like Seamonkey would greatly increase his stress levels not to mention work load. So for this early release we "block" or at least warn users (depends what you're doing) that the experience might be flakey. In fact our FF support is often better than IE as most of the devs, myself included, use FF and FireBug to develop. We do have a large issue related to using plugins in two iframes that communciate with each other which causes FF to throw errors like it was going out of fashion. |
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