Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Well, it's been a REALLY long time since I've posted about stuff I'm working on. One of the reasons I haven't posted about work related stuff is that I stopped working on Mail back when the M8 milestone was starting up (last summer). I worked on another project, then went on parental leave, and when I returned there was an opportunity to work on Mail Hotmail again and I took it. Moving forward my team and I are going to be responsible for the core mail features for Windows Live Hotmail. Think of this as a big chunk of the "application" which in our case consists of the server and the rendered HTML or AJAX code. Hotmail is a really significant project and there are LOTS of people that support developing and maintaining the service so I don't want to trivialize the fact that there are many other moving parts and areas of responsibility that my peers manage as part of the service.
I had a lot of fun on the other project. A small part of me is sad that I'm no longer a part of the team, since it's filled with so many talented folks and a really amazing future. However, coming back to work on Hotmail reminds me just how much I like working in this space. I'm an e-mail nut at heart, and it's what I've done for the majority of my 8+ years at Microsoft... and it's what ultimately brought me out to the west coast.
Anyway, the team just finished releasing M10 to the entire site today. M10 is a milestone along a remarkable journey that started in 2004 when I joined the MSN Hotmail team. I'm really proud of the work the team has done, and the polish and performance found in M10. We wrote the product from scratch (practically zero code reuse from the current MSN Hotmail) on .NET inventing and using technologies along the way to deliver a rich and fast experience that leapfrogs our current free mail product. The challenges we faced and the things we learned are really profound.
In fact you might notice that Yahoo Mail beta seems to be taking a few cues from our playbook (ignoring their storage announcement for a moment). There are some hard and fast facts around performance of Rich AJAX applications that a small number of major services are dealing with. And I'm talking about services that need to scale to hundreds of millions of users (with tens of millions of logons) across thousands of servers in hundreds of markets and cities across the world. There are no wide spread "best practices" out there to borrow. There is a lot of hard work in finding the right balance between performance and richness and deploying a service to a world wide audience with very little downtime.
Anyway, I just wanted to write this post acknowledging the excellent work the team has done, and mention that I'm back working on a project that I helped start with a group of amazingly smart and dedicated folks. It should be a fun summer watching the user base grow.
PS - I'd like to point out that Windows Live Hotmail M10 was recently positively reviewed in PC Mag and received an editor's choice award (along with Yahoo).