Prioritizing, responsibilities and open source

November 2008 had a lot of fun reads and I had a great time going over all those old post. But a few things stood out apart from the $1,000 I apparently spent on fraud prevention fees for US visas.

First of all the old post on how to trick customers (and others) into prioritizing things when everything is top priority is still valid and worth a read.

The incident that inspired me to write about single responsibility principle and how making it easy isn't a single responsibility that makes sense made me giggle. I still remembered that passionate discussion where a guy on the team wanted to put a bunch of random unrelated code in the same class since the purpose of the class "was to make it easy to write new applications".

I also have to make an honorable mention that we in 2008 announced that we (at Microsoft) would release our unix work as open source. Given how far Microsoft have come today in releasing things as open source and for other operating systems than Windows it is hard to believe how ground breaking this was eight years ago. By the way the code in question is still on codeplex.