Laura John is a PM at MSDN working to add some much-needed process to MSDN.
I don't know if you know this, but MSDN is growing and changing. I'm a member of a species at MSDN: a Content Strategist. Others include people you're likely to know and read: Kent Sharkey, Duncan Mackenzie, Tim Ewald, etc. Together, we form a rag-tag team busy throwing off ideas and feature requirements and half-implemented code to be added to our Developer Centers. Anything but a menu structure on MSDN's library content is pretty new to MSDN and what the CSes are doing is disruptive, frankly.
Laura is one of those calm, gentle folks adding process to the chaos. She and I are both fairly new to MSDN and we hit it off immediately. She's into "just enough process," which is what I came to know and love in my own s/w orgs.
Anyway, that all serves as an intro to her new blog, which I've subscribed to and encourage you to do the same. I think she really gets what makes processes and orgs work (and not just 'cuz she agrees with me : ). Enjoy.
There's only 11 days left on this:
"Microsoft is pleased to offer Visual Studio .NET 2002 Professional, Enterprise Developer, and Enterprise Architect customers a corresponding upgrade to a Visual Studio .NET 2003 product for only $29 US. This offer is open until September 30, 2003."
Alan Cooper visited my house a coupla months ago and in addition to taking the excited Sells brothers and a shaky Tim and me for a ride in his 6-seater prop plane (where he made me fly most of the time, explaining why Tim and I were shaky), he and Tim and I had a mind-blowing conversation the likes of which I've had maybe a dozen times in my life. Tim and I talked about it for weeks afterwards and we're still different because of it, I think.
Anyway, a bit of what we talked about that weekend is in Alan's latest piece. Recommended.
