Whose laughing now, Twitter?

Looks like I found an alternate means of getting my stupid messages out to the world just in time, before the great Twitter Outage of ot-nine.

Working hard, will write some fiction tonight. Summer party tomorrow, went to a tech talk earlier about Testing. Got a rad book, "How We Test Software At Microsoft". The book was written by the three guys who did the presentation, Alan Page, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison, who all do neat Test related stuff here at Microsoft. They're pretty cool guys, and illuminated the topic magnificently.

For those who don't know, Microsoft splits production up into "feature crews" which have a Developer (Software Development Engineer), a Tester (Software Development Engineer in Test), and a Spec-Writer / Designer (Program Manager), who all work together to create a feature. This sounds like perhaps a trivial detail from the outside, but it is a vital piece of our culture. Think about how important testing software is, and how undervalued it tends to be. Now think about your perception of "oh god microsoft makes bad products lawl". Now think about the fact that they employ about 11,000 SDEs (devs) in total, and about 9,000 SDETs (tests) - there is nearly a tester for every dev in the company. Testing is taken very seriously here, and regardless of any person's opinions on Microsoft or its products, this is a powerful defense against bugs and defects. Complex software will have issues - and our testers (in conjunction with devs, and pms) do a damn fine job of sorting those out and producing high quality software.

Anyway, that's enough of my hivemindspeak for now. Tried ModPlug recently; where has it been all my life?!