People have often used the phrase 'drinking from a firehose' to describe their first few weeks at Microsoft. I felt the same way when I joined two years ago and I feel the same way now, starting afresh at Redmond and Popfly. The last few days have been a blur. On one hand, I've been immersed in setting up life at Redmond (which is quite challenging when you're vegetarian and can't drive a car). The real challenge has been to come up to speed on Popfly and to absorb all the knowledge the team has built up. This team has done a tremendous amount of work, spanning teams, technologies and geographical regions. The buzz after our launch has been insane - you know you're in a good spot when you've got MarkL talking about you ;-)

Why Popfly?

Before Popfly went live, I had a tough time explaining what my new team does to folks at Microsoft (talking to people outside was obviously a strict no-no). I eventually wound up telling people either or both of the below

"Think Visual Basic meets Flickr"

I learnt to code using Visual Basic. My first ever program was a tabbed browser (years before Firefox :-) )built by drag-dropping the webbrowser control and writing a few lines of code. If I had had to learn to program using just a text editor without an IDE, I don't think I would have ever learnt to enjoy programming. I know tons of people who learn to code that way - I'm just not one of them and I'm not alone. Popfly really tries to capture that same essence of VB within the context of Web 2.0². Imagine if you, the newbie VB developer, could share your creations with your friends or with the entire world with a click of a button, let them learn from it and modify it, rate it and run it on any website they wanted to. That's exactly what Popfly is. We can extend this analogy in interesting ways.Instead of VB's COM components and controls, you get to use any web service you want (wrapped by Popfly blocks). For UI, instead of Win32 controls in VB, you get to use Silverlight or plain ol' HTML controls with Ajax.

VB made software developers out of an entire generation of people who never thought they could create software. If Popfly can accomplish even half of what VB did (and continues to do), I think we would have been a resounding success.

"'View Source' for the next generation of coders"¹

  Almost all web developers I know learnt HTML by doing a 'View Source' in their browser. I remember 'stealing' the color '#6699CC' from the old Microsoft.com site and using it on all my personal sites for years. Popfly embraces the same principles. Any creation you see on Popfly can be 'ripped' and modified. So if you see some interesting creation on the Popfly site or embedded on a page, go ahead and see how the code is written - it's the best way to learn. I should know - I've spent a lot of time in the last week learning from Adam's mashups.

 On the site, this can be done by clicking 'Rip It' next to any creation, be it a project or a block. When you see an embedded Popfly mashup on a webpage, just mouse-over and click on the VS infinity icon. You should now be able to click 'Customize this' which will open up the mashup in the Popfly designer.

The Team

This has to be the craziest, most kick-ass bunch of folks I've seen. Here's a random sampling of the craziness  from just last week alone

- Me: Are you always this weird?
  John: No - I'm usually just hostile

- Adam trying to recreate the Popfly designer with red pieces of jello and a fork.

- Me hitting a breakpoint on the internal dev site and then leaving my office. Blocking every dev on the team simultaneously is not a good thing to do in your first week on the team :-)

- Tim Rice, a superstar dev on my team, actually beat the Saltine challenge in our weekend team gathering. I barely ate one.

Notes

1. I swear I didn't steal this from Aaron :-)

2. I hate using the term 'web 2.0' but I couldn't think of a better collective term to describe Youtube, MySpace, Flickr, Del.icio.us, etc. 

# Saturday, June 02, 2007 8:43 PM