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Jobs, AppWeeks, and Beta 2 in the oven...

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It's been busy but it's been worth it. Lots has been done over the last couple of months and beta 2 should be a good one. Because we've been a little shorthanded lately it's been a bit busier even but we've made some progress on that front with some new additions to the team who will be starting in the next couple of months. That doesn't mean we're not hiring anymore though as we still have plenty of open positions. So it's not too late to join the fun.

A few weeks ago we had an AppWeek which provided a nice break from the push to beta 2 work as the PM and QA teams spent one week just coding away on some cool projects. It's possible some of those will get shared with the community once beta 2 is officially out the door. I'm actually planning on continuing to develop the app my team created well into the future as it's a tool I'm using every day now and I think others would potentially find it useful as well. Anyway, I think Shaykat is the one to watch for news on that if you're interested though it'll probably happen after beta 2 is out.

The good part about this AppWeek was that VS was in pretty good shape overall. In the past, some AppWeeks, especially some of the ones we had back in the 7.0 timeframe, turned out to be monumental efforts and great stress tests for your own stamina and perseverance as the product just wasn't in good shape. No matter how hard you tried to focus on the app you're trying to build you ended up spending tons of time figuring out repros and workarounds to product bugs and encountering crashes, lost data, etc. Clearly, the most painful AppWeeks are those you have early in a product cycle when the product is still far from prime time. But they still generate good data for us as far as bugs go and usability issues.

This last AppWeek was a dream compared to those. All of the teams were able to successfully complete their projects in the given week and they all were pretty impressive. There were no areas of the product getting pointed out as still needing significant work and definitely no areas that people came to hate over the week. This tells us we're getting closer to getting it out to customers and nothing could be more motivating.

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick one since it's been a while since I've posted. I'll probably be gone for a bit more but will be back when there's a little more time. Till then, I recommend Shaykat's updates on what we're up to...

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