My first one on one interview was with Sara Ford, who at the time was the Program Manger for CodePlex.com. Since then, Sara has joined the DPE team. She does, however, still retain her passion for Visual Studio and blogging.

I arrived at Building 5, the building where the CodePlex team works, at around 1:00 PM. Within a few minutes of my arrival, Ms. Ford met me down in the lobby and took me up to the CodePlex office.

The office was different that most of the offices I visited throughout the day. The developers all sat in a common area, writing code in stations that had two keyboards. Ms. Ford explained that this was their unique version of “pair programming”, where two developers write code and do near real-time code reviews. This plays into their own version of the Agile release cycle.

You may be asking: What is Agile? Well, the common release cycle for a product is know as Waterfall. This is a more traditional cycle, where the product goes from specification, to implementation, testing, release, and finally maintenance. Agile is a lot more rapid than Waterfall. Agile, on the other hand, is a three week release cycle. The first two weeks of any Agile cycle are spent developing new features for the product, with a third week spent on fixing bugs from previous releases and tightening the features for the latest release. After they deploy, they start over again, figuring out what to do for the next release.

After that, Ms. Ford shared some interesting facts about CodePlex. CodePlex is home to roughly 13,000 projects, with a total of 200+ Million Lines of Code, with 100-150 projects being added weekly. They’ve recently added support for Mercurial based projects, which was seen as a huge addition to the site.

Ms. Ford also shared some interesting facts about her career at Microsoft. She attended college at the Mississippi State University, where she was a member of ACM. While in college, she refused to think of herself as ever working at Microsoft, hating the idea of “becoming a code monkey” for Microsoft. And now she’s been a key part of one of Microsoft’s best open source initiatives, and continues to contribute to the Microsoft community with her new role in the company.

I had a great time talking with Ms. Ford, and I highly recommend you read her blog and follow her on Twitter as she continues her career, moving in to DPE for a new exciting career experience.

Until next time, thanks for reading
Patrick Godwin