Jeff Makes Software

I had my first "real" day at Microsoft today (the first day is mostly an HR thing). There's still a great deal of stuff to do to really get settled, as anyone who has ever started a developer job knows, but it felt like I actually worked there today.

The last refresh of Google Maps messed up my street. I live two houses down from an intersection, where on one side the street has one name, and a different name on the other (two subdivisions started years apart). In the last refresh, they had the name from the other street extending half way down my street. I noticed a "report problem" link on the map, so I did. Here's what I got...

Trying to wrap your head around leaving an area you've been around for 36 years for a destination and job 2,400 miles away is one of the single most bizarre things that I've encountered in my life. The time between my arrival in Seattle to interview at Microsoft (I was in town for just 27 hours) to my start date is going to be about six and a half weeks, or a month and a half. I'm not sure if that's making good time or not, and I'd love to hear stories from other current Microfolk who have relocated. The only unknown variable left is the move scheduling.

I saw this post from Ken Cox about his displeasure with the preview of the new VB developer site, specifically the animated box at the bottom. You've seen these before on a million different sites, where a number of featured content items are previewed.

If you haven't seen it (or don't otherwise subscribe to his blog), do check out Hanselman's peek at the new MSDN.

As I mentioned previously, I interviewed in Redmond for a position with Microsoft in the Server & Tools Online group, specifically Community Applications & Services (Codeplex, MSDN forums and other stuff in that area). I got the word Friday that I had an offer, today I verbally accepted it, and pending a background check and move, I should be starting some time in early November! I posted a few words about the interview experience on my personal blog.

I'm coming out this week to Redmond again to visit Microsoft and interview, this time for a developer gig.

I've been thinking a lot about all of the frameworks we have now to use with our, uh, frameworks. There's a framework to solve every problem. Dependency injection frameworks are of particular interest to a lot of people because they make unit testing ridiculously easy. They're also well suited to something like ASP.NET MVC, where you're trying to make as few dependencies as possible between the various concerns.