PowerShell is a scripting and command line shell built on top of the .NET runtime. Although it was originally created for Windows, Microsoft recently introduced an open source version of PowerShell powered by the cross-platform compatible .NET Core. Users can now download and run PowerShell on Linux and Mac OS X.

One of PowerShell’s strengths is its interoperability with the .NET ecosystem. PowerShell can load types and methods from .NET assemblies, making it possible for PowerShell scripts to incorporate functionality that is implemented in practically any C# library. That capability also makes PowerShell a great environment for interactively exploring C# APIs.

When Microsoft announced the availability of PowerShell on Linux earlier this month, I tried it out in a Docker container on my home Ubuntu server. As an experiment, I had it load up the C# RethinkDB driver developed by Brian Chavez. Using the driver, I was able to instantiate a RethinkDB database connection and perform queries from the comfortable confines of the interactive PowerShell command line environment.

To learn more about initial setup, using the RethinkDB driver in PowerShell and more, visit the original post here: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/powershell/

Lucas Humenhuk, a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft in Brazil, talks about being a lawyer, his favorite open source moment and powerhouse Brazillian role models.

What do you currently do at Microsoft?
I am a technical evangelist in Brazil, working with Azure — specifically with IoT, mobile apps, machine learning and big data.

What was your background before you started at Microsoft?
It’s a funny thing, actually — I have a law degree, so I was doing law for five years. After that, I wanted to join the tech world, so I studied computer science — specifically Information Systems. From there, I started developing mobile apps for Apple and then worked at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Brazil teaching Microsoft technologies. Nearly two years later, I received the invite to work at Microsoft.

What got you curious enough about technology to make you leave law?
I’ve always been connected with technology. I think I studied law because my parents also worked in law, and I looked to them as my heroes so I figured I’d also study law. But I’ve always loved technology. I think I can be even more helpful in technology than in law. The best thing to me is spotting a problem and being able to solve that problem. Using technology, we can fix the world, we can work with people with disabilities, we can work with the health industry, we can work on everything.

What was it like when you first started as an evangelist?
When I arrived at Microsoft, it was like a new world for me. It’s a huge company with different people, different customers, different cultures… and the technical evangelist role fits me because I like to talk a lot. So as a lawyer, I talked a lot. When I spent my days teaching Microsoft technologies in the Microsoft innovation Center, I developed this trait to be able to speak to many people. When I arrived at Microsoft to become a Technical Evangelist, I thought, “Yes, this role is for me.”

How did you get into open source?
In Brazil, we are encouraged to contribute to open source projects. We have noticed that the community is asking for more open source technologies. Because I have a background working with iOS and a variety of other languages, this helped.

What are some of the most memorable things you’ve done so far?
Six months ago, I was working with a friend of mine who worked at Intel. I noticed that we had the opportunity to use Azure for this project. So I came up with some code using Node.js and using Node-RED, which is an IBM tool, and I developed a lot of nodes to connect to Azure. Suddenly there was a lot of growth… I had more than 50,000 downloads of these nodes. Because of this, I was invited by AT&T to attend an event because the Head of AT&T asked Microsoft HQ to send me to San Francisco to be a mentor at their hackathon using my tools inside their tools.

Exciting!
It was fantastic — it was a great opportunity for me. If I all I need to do is write simple code for the open source community, I can change not only my community in Brazil, but also the open source community around the world. So far, it’s been the best project for me.

If all I need to do is write simple code for the open source community, I can change not only my community in Brazil, but also the open source community around the world.

Who are some people that inspire you?
Alex Kipman and Rico Malvar — in fact, they both work at Microsoft. Alex Kipman is a Technical Fellow who created HoloLens and Kinect. He is Brazilian. I had the opportunity to meet and talk to him last year. Rico Malvar is the Technical Lead at Microsoft Research, and also Brazilian. It’s cool for me because sometimes in Brazil we think “Ok, I live in Brazil so no one at Microsoft HQ will be looking at me to hire.” But when I see these guys working there in these big roles and changing the world by developing the best technologies ever, I think that I can get there.

What’s been one of the biggest surprises for you during your time at Microsoft?
If you can remember Microsoft three or four years ago and compare Microsoft to what it is now, it is another company. And I had the opportunity to join at the same time that the company was transforming. But it’s like a surprise for me because for the first time that I came here for an interview, I had an iPhone, and I tried to hide it because I thought that if the interviewers saw me using an iPhone, then I will probably never be hired. And now, it’s way more common to see iPhones here.

Quick Bytes
Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: Saltines and Coca-Cola!
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: So far, Visual Studio
Favorite Swag: Microsoft ❤ Linux stickers

You can follow Lucas on Twitter at @MSLucasH.

Lucas, Technical Evangelist @ Microsoft was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ryan Farr, a software engineer intern within the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft, talks about side projects, what’s he’s up to this summer and cheesecake.

Tell us about yourself!
I study computer science at the University of Utah. The summer before this internship, I was working for NASA’s Glenn Research Center. I’ll be doing research next semester along with being a TA. I also have a game I’ve been working on with some friends. We got the game, “We Need To Go Deeper,” greenlit on Steam so that’s mostly what I work on in my spare time.

How did you find out about the Microsoft internship?
I saw the opportunity in a newsletter that said Microsoft recruiters were going to be looking for resumes at the University of Utah. This event was going on in the building that I was spending all of my semesters in so I was like, “Why not?” At first, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to work for Microsoft. But when I came here to do the interview, that’s when I decided that I wanted to work here. I felt the passion from everybody that was interviewing me. I was amazed at how good these people were at their jobs. It just wasn’t the picture that I originally had of Microsoft. So then I was like, “Yeah! I should do this.”

I felt the passion from everybody that was interviewing me. I was amazed at how good these people were at their jobs.

Did you apply specifically to intern at the Open Source Programs Office?
I was placed into it — I had no clue what I was getting into at all. After the interviews, I kind of had an idea that I was going to be in the developer division. But until just three weeks before I came here, I actually had no clue what I was going to be doing or where I was going to be. But it was really cool to find out that I was going to be on the open source team. I was very happy.

What have you been working on so far this summer?
I work on something called Microsoft GitHub Torrent or MSGHT. It’s a program that goes and collects pretty much all the available data on Microsoft’s GitHubs, repositories, organizations and users. I’m also using this data to build cops that will make sure everybody is following Microsoft policies [on GitHub]. Later on, I’ll be doing analytics and data just to get an idea of what the best open source projects look like, what measure we have on those projects, how we can strive to be better, and more.

What part(s) of the project took the longest to build?
All of it. It’s a large and difficult thing to build in general. I think that taking the GH Torrent, which is basically what we used to build MSGHT, and turning it into something that would work for us ended up taking a long time. It involved going through a relatively large codebase — it’s not like Microsoft Word or anything — but sizable and in Ruby, which no one in my group knew anything about, myself included. Then adding security to it and extra functionality and web hooks and dumping, connecting it to Azure so we can get the data to everyone. It ended up being a really long and unexpectedly challenging process.

Has your perspective on open source changed since starting this internship?
Oh absolutely. It has really opened my eyes to how cool open source is. I think I didn’t really even understand the appeal of open source to some extent. I didn’t really understand why it is that people would collaborate. I didn’t really understand open source in general. Having now riffed on stuff and contributed a fair bit, I’m really into this now and I really enjoy it. I think it’s neat to observe [open source] communities an how people interact within these communities. I’ll be for sure working on more open source after my internship is over.

Quick Bytes
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: Outside of the internship, I’m using Visual Studio and writing in C#. I oftentimes use Unity to make games. Here I use a Linux VM and eMacs primarily but also do things remotely using Visual Studio Code on my Mac.

Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: Cheesecake. That’s my favorite any time snack.

Favorite Swag: Microsoft jacket!

Role Model: Jonathan Blow. He’s the creator of the game called Braid and I think he’s one of the first people to take video games seriously as artistic mediums. I think he’s brilliant in everything he does.

Ryan, Software Engineer Intern @ Microsoft was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jakub Jedryszek, a software engineer on the Azure Portal, talks about his side project voiceCmdr as well as late-night Coca-Cola and ninja stickers.

What do you currently do at Microsoft?
I’m a software engineer on the Azure Portal. I work on the front-end and, more precisely, work on the Azure Portal Framework on top of which other teams build extensions that are Azure features. For example, websites, virtual machines, SQL and so on.

How did you get into open source?
It just happened — I mean when I do something after work, I just put [my projects] on GitHub because why not? And then maybe somebody will find it useful, maybe not. So that’s sort of how I got started. These days, most successful projects are open source. Everybody is on GitHub — there’s a great community there. So we can find a lot of useful stuff out there.

What do you like about open source?
The fact that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. Like when somebody does something once, we don’t have to do it over and over again. Back in the day, people were implementing sort algorithms all over before they were implemented in standard libraries, for example. I think that was a waste of time because there are great experts in sorting, and they could have just implemented it once. So I think that’s the main advantage of open source. It also helps us to innovate faster because it helps to share knowledge across people. The third reason is to be able to connect across people that you probably would never meet if it weren’t for the projects out there.

Let’s talk about your project, voiceCmdr. What the story behind it?
We get a lot of feedback that it’s hard to find things in the Azure Portal. So one time I joked that maybe we should add voice commands so people can just talk to the portal and the portal can give them what they want. I decided to check if this was possible or not, then realized that Google Hangouts works in the browser and thought that this project should be possible. I found the Web Speech API and discovered that it’s available in Chrome. It is a browser API that does not require any libraries. Hopefully it’s coming soon to Edge — they have it in the backlog now because of UserVoice, where you can vote for feature. Half a year ago, for instance, this feature only had a few votes but now it has over a thousand. Anyway, I prototyped how the voice commands could look like. I thought that using the row of web speech API in the browser would be painful, so I decided that I would just create this library that would make it easier to use — specifically for voice commands. The sample can be found on this website and the code is also on GitHub.

How long did it take to get the project up and running?
A few nights.

That’s quick!
It’s not necessarily rocket science. It’s a simple wrapper that’s using this API. What took me a lot of time was capturing the behavior of web speech API, which was a bit painful to figure out because it’s not very well documented and it is still experimental technology.

How does this work?
For example, I discovered that if you run the speech recognition in two tabs, it just crashes — and stuff like that. So those are small things, but now once you use voiceCmdr, you don’t have worry about these bugs. You just do voiceCmdr.addCommand, provide a string as a first parameter (e.g. “hello” or “home), and a callback function as a second parameter that does whatever you ant to do. Usually, to navigate to a different page.

So it’s out there on GitHub… are you still working on it?
To be honest, since I put it there I’ve only made a few small fixes here and there. The WebSpeech API seems to be very stable — they didn’t introduce any breaking changes that would affect voiceCmdr. Now I am waiting until Microsoft Edge will add it. And from there, I’ll be able to write jQuery for the web speech API. There are a lot of other opportunities to extend it. For example, you can add language support because for now there is only support for English, which is the default language. But for now it’s a very simple library with less than two hundred lines of code. So even if people don’t want to use it, they can just copy and paste the code and use it in their projects.

What are some good use cases for voice commands?
So there’s Cortana on Windows… so you can talk to Cortana and Cortana navigates for you. I think that would be a very good use case. And sometimes you have search, but sometimes search doesn’t allow you to type “profile settings” or something else you want to find. And with the voice commands, you can add a little bit of intelligence to that. It would be pretty cool if you could add some machine learning to analyze commands from users, and guess what they are looking for. I believe would be sort of like Google or Bing search, but a little bit different because we usually talk differently from how we write. Voice commands would also be good for people with disabilities — for people who might be blind or vision-impaired. This could help them a lot.

Quick Bytes
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: Three monitors — for C# I use Visual Studio, but for JavaScript or TypeScript I use Sublime. Sometimes I also use Vim.

Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: Coca-Cola? I usually drink coke when coding late at night.

Favorite Swag: Ninjacat stickers!

Role Model: Steve Sanderson. He created Knockout.js and used to work with us on the Azure Portal. He’s an outstanding developer, awesome technical speaker and has great communication skills (which is not common among developers).

Jakub, Software Engineer @ Microsoft was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Software Heritage has already collected more than 20 million software projects, archiving more than two billion and a half unique source files. Together, with all of the source files development history, this project is already the richest collection of source code on the planet.

Microsoft has been involved in open source initiatives by enabling, integrating, releasing and contributing to many open source projects and communities for well over a decade.

Microsoft Azure has opened up over 200 repositories on GitHub, and has over 2,000 engineers engage in this community alone. Through this deep involvement in open source, Microsoft has undergone massive culture transformations driven by an evolving workforce.

More than ever before, it remains critical to reflect and learn, and continue to think about how we curate and conserve human knowledge — in the form of code — for future of generations. We strongly believe that Software Heritage will be a great tool to help today’s generations of developers find and re-use code worldwide.

Through this partnership, we are supporting the Software Heritage project with a Microsoft Research grant program, providing the Azure infrastructure to ensure the data is highly available, allowing the project to grow and scale and continues to flourish.

We are proud to be one of the first industry partners for this initiative, happy to be alongside other great partners from academia and open source communities and excited to see what’s in store for the future of open source and Software Heritage.

-Jean Paoli, General Manager, Microsoft Corp.

Want to learn more? Read more from the INRIA press release and check out the Software Heritage website.

Microsoft Supports the Software Heritage Project was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We thought the list was fantastic, and wanted to post some of these snippets on here too for our readers.

Donation Button

Pros:
-Few strings attached
-Little work involved: “set it and forget it”

Cons:
-Usually not much money unless you have dedicated fundraising efforts
-Need a legal entity to donate to (e.g. SFC, OpenCollective are fiscal sponsors for this purpose). Harder for individual or international donations to manage
-Sometimes not clear who “deserves” money in a project or how it gets distributed

Books and Merchandise

Pros:
-Outcome not tied to project work itself, so you can retain creative freedom
-Can serve as marketing for the project itself
-Can be recurring source of revenue after initial development

Cons:
-Often not a significant source of revenue
-Can distract from core development of project
-Merchandise can have upfront costs

Start a project while currently employed

Pros:
-Freedom to test new ideas without worrying about salary
-Can be well-aligned with company needs
-Suitable for newer, experimental ideas

Cons:
-Need to do it as a side project or be approved to work on it during salaried time
-Risk of undue company influence
-Can lead to complicated governance later down the line

Grants

Pros:
-Fewer strings attached
-Guaranteed money can help project focus for an unbroken period of time
-Gives project room to breathe and experiment

Cons:
-There aren’t many software related grantmakers (philanthropic, gov’t, corporate)
-Grants are still finite. Still need to find sustainability beyond the life of a grant

Foundations & consortiums

Pros:
-Neutrality. Foundation protects the code and helps steward community
-Influence distributed across multiple donors
-Can legitimize project, companies might feel more comfortable giving to foundations than individuals

Cons:
-Only really worth it for big projects
-Difficult to set up for IRS reasons (many do 501c6 instead of 501c3), restrictions on what you can do
-Requires serious community effort and diverse skills (you still need to fundraise after setting up the entity!)

You can continue reading more here.

Nadia Eghbal is a Principal at Collaborative Fund, based out of San Francisco. Previously, she cofounded Feast, an online company getting busy people to cook (500 Startups Batch 6), and helped build the R&D team at GreatSchools, an education-focused website for parents of PK-12 children. You can find her tweeting or writing Medium posts at @nayafia.

With this year’s DockerCon being held in Seattle, we couldn’t contain our excitement. We’re huge fans of Docker and DockerCon made us even bigger believers in Docker.

For example, when Gordon the Turtle decided to take over the Day 1 keynote, he unleashed the power of laser-beaming kittens!

But in all seriousness, there were some exciting announcements during the keynote sessions.

On Day 1, Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker, revealed that in the first 24 hours that the betas for Mac and Windows were released, there were 30,000 testers and up until DockerCon, there have been 70,000 beta-tester sign ups since March 2016. Amazing! So Docker decided to put Docker for Mac and Windows in public beta, which you can download here.

And if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, Solomon also announced the private beta for AWS and Azure, which you can sign up for here.

And in the history of containers, the words of Solomon Hykes will be forever remembered:

“Nobody cares about containers… It’s the application that matters!”

Later in the sessions, Steve Lasker, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, presented on workflows for developing, debugging and deploying containerized applications.

The Windows Server container team got a fantastic selfie with Betty Junod of Docker too!

During the Day 2 keynote, Mark Russinovich, Azure’s CTO, did a live demo of deploying the Docker Datacenter to Azure as well as running SQL Server on Linux in a container on Swarm cluster.

Zeph Gardler, whose father is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, took the stage at DockerCon and wowed the attendees with his talk on mining Minecraft stats using containers. Go Zeph!

It was a great time, and if you were at DockerCon, we hope you had a blast as well. We received a lot of great comments and feedback on these announcements, and we hope to receive more in the future!

Microsoft at DockerCon! was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the other hand, Keith Loo, Open Source Lead at Microsoft Canada, and his now-wife Mila had different ideas for their wedding. Instead of the usual vows, they decided to change things up a little bit and added a Microsoft and open source twist to their special day.

Keith talks more about his action-packed wedding as well as his time at Microsoft maintaining Make Web Not War and more.

When you started at Microsoft, were you always doing open source?
Yes — I was always known as the open source guy in my area. But one day, Microsoft reached out to me and asked if I’d like to work on open source for them. That was kind of surprising to me — this was about five years ago. I didn’t know that Microsoft even did open source then. If anything, I had always assumed that Microsoft was anti-open source. I never really wanted to work there before because I was an open source guy. But I was supremely impressed by the people and by the passion they had for open source. In open source communities, we respect the people that really contribute to open source, and I realized that the people I respected so much were Microsoft employees. And that’s when I realized that maybe I should give Microsoft a try.

On that note, you decided to incorporate a lot of Microsoft references in your wedding. What inspired this?
I think [the references] go toward my history with Microsoft. I’ve always been known as the open source guy and, if anything, the anti-Microsoft guy. But now — on the most important day of my life — I really wanted Microsoft to be a part of it, since it’s made a pretty big difference in my life. We threw in Xbox (Halo), Windows (Cortana), Make Web Not War (Azure and Open Source). We had a bit of everything. Even on our wedding day, we did something at Microsoft that’s never been done before — we shot our wedding in the Microsoft Technology Center. One of the security officers there said that in the twelve years that they’ve worked there, they’ve never seen something like this. But we took some really, really cool action shots.

How did the idea for this video come about?
Mila and I are — we like to use the term — eclectic. She’s a stunt actress and fights in movies for a living, and therefore she loves action. She’s a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo and she’s all about fitness, health and fighting. Whereas me, I’m the opposite. I’m a geek. We’re different in that way, so our wedding was a combination of both of us. We did things that we thought represented us. So that was reflected in our wedding video — we wanted something that was really us. We figured if our wedding video was an action movie based on video games, that would represent us.

The story behind the idea is that we’ve always told every single person a different story about how we’ve met, which is true. We’ve never told anyone how we’ve really met. Even our closest friends and family don’t know how we met. So it’s kind of funny. And so the night of our wedding one of my closest friends asked everyone if they wanted to know how we met. This video was our latest rendition of that.

How long did it take to get everything together?
It took a lot longer than it seems. I would say there were weeks of practice, but we were fortunate that all four stunt actors are actual actors. The choreography was probably two weeks straight of practicing six to eight hours a day. The shoot itself was a 22-hour shoot. It was like filming a short film, and we were very fortunate to work with a producer, director and crew who actually make top flight TV shows, movies and commercials. And of course there was a lot of paperwork because we are technically using a lot of Microsoft copyrighted products. This process did take a while, but I learned during the process that Microsoft is generally cool with their Halo fan base because they want to encourage the gaming community to have a great time.

How did people react to the video and the whole production?
If you’re a gamer — there were a lot of gamers and Microsofties at our wedding — then they obviously got all of the references. I think everyone can appreciate when Mila’s kicking butt on screen. That’s pretty cool. It was really well-received and it was great to see something we made that our friends and family could laugh at and have a good time with.

Any final thoughts?
I’m truly grateful that all the people and teams at Microsoft were so supportive of our special day. From Xbox, Halo, Azure, Open Source, the MTC, Marketing, PR, HR, and the security teams — our wedding would not have been so awesome and truly ours without their support, and further cements myself as an OSS guy who truly loves Microsoft.

You can wish Keith and Mila congratulations on Twitter @thekeithloo and also learn more about Microsoft Canada’s open source community via Make Web Not War.

A Very Merry Open Source Wedding was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sebastien Ros, a developer on the ASP.NET MVC team, talks about the early days of Orchard, how to get started contributing and keys to successful projects.

What do you currently do at Microsoft?
I am a developer — I currently work on the ASP.NET MVC team. I switch between ASP.NET MVC as well as Orchard, so depending on the workload we have for my other team or Orchard, I go from one project or the other. In the same day I can work on two projects, so it depends.

Orchard?
Orchard is a content management system like WordPress. It’s pretty much the same thing but made in ASP.NET and MVC — it’s both open source and free. The goal is that we can provide an open source CMS built with ASP.NET and MVC.

Is Orchard a Microsoft-led project?
Officially, no. It was created six years ago at Microsoft by ten engineers within a team at Microsoft. Orchard was open source from day one, and eventually was housed under the .NET foundation. It was never branded as a Microsoft project. It has switched completely two years after and has become much more community-driven. So now it’s not really Microsoft product any longer. I could not be here tomorrow and the product would still be alive. For a lot of Microsoft projects, if all the developers were to disappear, the project would die. But this project is much more community-managed.

When did you get involved with the project?
I got involved around 2010. The project started in 2009 and I moved from France to join Microsoft in 2010 to work on the project. Since then I’ve been doing that and other projects within Microsoft but I was always active on this project. I’m the lead developer on it in fact, but it lives by itself. I mostly drive the community as well as the meetings that occur.

Is this your first open source project?
Yes and no. This is the first at this level because it’s not necessarily open in the way people can see the source code. It’s open in the way that people contribute and drive the source code. It’s not just us doing what we want and simply showing the source code. It’s a community effort and community-managed project. So I’ve worked on other open source projects before but these projects were typically where you were the only contributor and people would be able to use it as a free product, not really open source in both ways — give and take. So at this level, yes — it’s my first open source project. But it’s been six years since and it has definitely changed. That’s the way it goes in open source.

What do you like about this project? Why do you keep nurturing this project?
At first it was because it was a potentially broad project with lots of users, but there weren’t any users at first. So what was interesting was building a tool that people could use. It was not really open in the way that people could contribute to — they were waiting for something to be there. Then the project became interesting in the next phase because it gave you more responsibilities so you have to deal with the project but also with the community. Now it’s interesting because it’s like growing the circle of people that you meet and work with. It’s not just your five or 10 colleagues in the same open office. Anyone can join the community and give their opinions. Some days someone will come with two weeks of effort, give us their code and say, “Look what I did,” and we’ll think it’s amazing. So all of this is what makes Orchard interesting to me — to be able to exchange with people from various origins, backgrounds, opinions. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it’s always a surprise. I’ve never had a boring moment. There’s always something new happening.

“All of this is what makes Orchard interesting to me — to be able to exchange with people from various origins, backgrounds, opinions. I’ve never had a boring moment. There’s always something new happening.”

How can people contribute to Orchard? How can they get started?
The simplest thing to do is to create issues that will say what a user thinks is bad or doesn’t work — improvement or what’s missing, just as feedback. Soon people will join meetings because we do two weekly meetings, which are open on Skype, where they can join and talk with us to drive the project. We’ll ask them questions on what to improve, and attendees might give us their opinion about a project or just talk sometimes, just following us. There are also people that might not be confident enough to provide code, so they’ll write documentation or fix typos in the code. They think that’s easier so they’ll do it, which is great. The most ambitious contributors usually come with new modules or they have a vision for the project that they’d like to work on. The project is open to anything — any success, any failure. I think that if you just try, that’s totally fine. We won’t bite them or fire them — after all, they voluntarily came to the project.

What do you see for the future of open source projects? What do you think needs to happen in order for them to be successful?
An open source project never fails — it’s just done and people can still continue to use them because they’re open and never die. You can fork them. There is just no more activity because… well, the job is done. Sometimes it’s just like this. So no failures. A project does fail, however, when the project itself cannot reach the audience they are trying to target. Still, as long as there is one user that’s happy with it, even then — the project didn’t fail. It maybe failed for the person who made it, but not for the person using it. In terms of continued success in open source… the key is momentum — to not only reach momentum, but to also keep momentum alive. On the web, for example, you have some websites that have been around for 20 years. But after 10 years, some websites haven’t changed at all. This is still kind of a success because the website is still living even if nobody is working on it. It’s not growing necessarily, but it’s still alive.

Quick Bytes
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: Visual Studio, Git and Git Extensions

Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: I don’t snack when I code. I’m too focused — I don’t have time to eat!!

Favorite Swag: My Orchard shirt

Role Model: Not role models necessarily, but people who I think are great are Ariya Hidayat and Nicholas Blumhardt

Open Source Stories: Sebastien, Developer @ Microsoft and Lead Developer on the Orchard Project was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Josh Goldberg, a Software Development Engineer on Office Sway, talks about TypeScript, FullScreenMario and beautiful code.

What are you currently working on in the Office Sway team?
We have a pretty large web application — it’s all written in TypeScript and works in a browser as well as native apps on Windows and iOS. It’s a relatively new application, but we recently invested more to start making it run smoother and have better performance. So I’m part of a team that investigates where we could do better and where we’re going wrong to try and fix it. In addition, I’m also very passionate about TypeScript, the web and beautiful code, so part of why they brought me on was to improve the team’s coding and add in tools like code analysis and linting to make the codebase look better.

Did you use TypeScript before coming to Microsoft?
Yes — quite a lot. My first big personal project — which was also my first open source project — was something called FullScreenMario. This was a JavaScript remake of the original Super Mario Bros which worked within the web browser in full-screen and had the original levels, level editor and map editor. As I was developing FullScreenMario, I experienced the same issues that many people go through writing JavaScript… that after the first few dozen lines of code, it is horrible to look at and needs structure. So I used TypeScript to add structure and TSLint — which is code linting to make the code stay organized— and pretty much fell in love with the language ever since. It was amazing to me that Microsoft had made this beautiful superset of JavaScript and instead of locking it down, they open sourced it, went for community involvement and worked with so many other people like Google and the Angular team have to make it the best product it can be.

Is TypeScript the reason you came to Microsoft?
Yes — partially. Microsoft as a whole has become better at its reputation. It makes a lot of great and amazing stuff, has a lot of brilliant people working here and I wanted to be both part of the company and also part of the push to make Microsoft even more of a player in open source’s modern practices.

Let’s switch gears to FullScreenMario. It got a lot of traction, didn’t it?
It was on a few places. I did a Reddit IAmA and it was also featured on Boing Boing, Gamasutra, CNET and others. I think Time also had a piece on it.

Was there an exact moment in time when you realized you wanted to build FullScreenMario?
I’ve been wanting to do it for a while. Back in college, before I started this, I was very new to programming. I had done it in high school a bit and was struggling with classes, so I wanted to do some sort of project to really teach myself how to be a programmer — a problem that a lot of people face. The imposter syndrome is really a powerful thing, where you look at all of these great hackers around you, and there’s always that one kid in class who knows every answer and you feel like you don’t know as much. So I felt like I should do something to get me going. My friend and I started joking around about how cool it would be if you could play Mario in the browser… and this sounded like a good idea to me.

What initially got you interested in open source?
It was two stages for me. The first was when I wanted to use Git and didn’t really know much else about open source. I just wanted a good system with good version control. So I started using GitHub to host my projects. It was nice — it was a little like Facebook where you could show off or look at other people’s projects. There was also this program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, my alma mater, called Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), which is an independent study you can take for a semester. You either get paid or receive four computer science credits. As part of the program, you’d work on an open source project, which is a fantastic opportunity. I chose to first do a web app and then a high school hacking site where I wrote lessons for kids. I got class credit for writing open source. And part of the program is that they show you how to use Git. They give you a mentor, they make sure that you understand what you’re doing, that you write blog posts — it’s a really fantastic way to introduce yourself and get introduced to the open source community, which is why I now have mentees in it.

How is the open source community at Microsoft?
I think it’s headed in a fantastic direction, though it’s not where it should be yet. I think that Microsoft as a company does amazing things with open source. Putting Ubuntu on Windows, open sourcing a bajillion parts of .NET and .NET itself. As a company, we are one of the top open source leaders of the world. But as individuals, the percentage of people who don’t understand open source is still large. It’s falling — we’re educating people and we’re really emphasizing that you should be using open source if and when appropriate. And part of that is this massive culture change where we’re taking a company that used to be boxed-in and very self-centered nd turning into an open player. I think there is some hesitancy. But with things like OneWeek and The Garage itself, the direction we’re headed in is positive and within a decade, I’m sure the company will be significantly more amazing than it already is.

“The direction we’re headed in is positive and within a decade, I’m sure the company will be significantly more amazing than it already is.”

Quick Bytes
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: Two monitors — one with Visual Studio Code open, the other with Grunt running some process

Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: Kahlua and pancakes

Favorite Swag: Microsoft Intern Hoodie!

Role Model: My dad — who is a mathematician — and Elon Musk because he has a great world view

Open Source Stories: Josh, Software Development Engineer @ Microsoft was originally published in Open at Microsoft on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.