One of the things that I have been loving about being back at Microsoft is working in the Developer Platform team.  I have always been a geek, and have this latent developer hiding inside of me.  I love designing interesting applications and services, and love to roll some code when I can, though my close friends will tell you that it’s not a good idea to let me have a compiler handy.  I wish I had more time to work on those projects.

I have a very, very strong outside-in view on the developer platform.  My last company was built on Ruby on Rails.  I think Python is a beautiful language.  I want nothing more than for developers, all developers, to be able to excel at their jobs.  Part of my role now includes bringing that passion for customers and developers and focusing it on reaching out to the community of developers who doesn’t use any Microsoft products.

It’s strange for me to consider that there is an entire generation of developers who have never used a Microsoft product.  I still remember using Microsoft Word for the first time after using WriteNow on the Mac for all of my papers in high school.  To really date myself, ask me about my love for BankStreet Writer on the Apple II.

Thus begins my quest to speak to as many developers as possible to understand their development environments and hear their reasons why they aren’t using .NET.  I am sure to get some flippant answers, but I want to listen and process and really try to solve for X, where X is “how can Microsoft better serve this community of developers?”

This brings me to the mini-campaign at the TechCrunch50 conference.  I will be wearing the shirt in the photo here throughout the conference, and walking around with a Flip Mino HD talking to as many developers as will let me, with only one question: “If you do not use .NET, can you please tell me why?”  I am not going to say one word about any of Microsoft’s products; that’s not important.  What’s important is listening to this large and growing group of developers building amazing products using Ruby, Python, Django, Rails, Scala, Struts, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, etc.  My top line goal is to listen, process, and then figure out what we can do to help those developers.

For anyone who wants to avoid the camera, you can always tell me on Twitter.  Why Twitter?  Because I want this to be out the open – the start of a conversation we haven’t been having.  Why my account?  Because I want people to know they are connecting with a person, a Director level person, at Microsoft, and not some alias.  This is a very un-Microsoft thing to do, and I have to give credit to my management chain for letting me go about this as if I were running a small startup.  Let the conversation begin, and remember: @BrandonWatson is listening.

…oh, and why you want to be ready for Scott Hanselman love

This afternoon I was sitting in a meeting discussing a potential upcoming marketing campaign to target developers.  It’s a great concept, and I am looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.  However, during the course of the discussion, it became clear that ad buys would be the primary driver of traffic.

My chief concern was that the developer audience uses ad blocker software at a higher rate than the general population.  We don’t have data on it, and no one was sure how to get it.  I asked the community at Hacker News, and was pointed to this posting about the downloads of AdBlock Plus.  That was a good start, but to really get an answer about which we could feel happy I came up with this hack to get quick and dirty numbers.

This is the part where I learned the following formula:

Scott Hanselman Influence + Survey Monkey + Basic Account = Fail

To get started, I created a survey up at Survey Monkey.  Unfortunately, the basic account has a cap at 100 responses for any survey.  I pinged Scott once I had the bit.ly link set up, asking for help from his tweeple.  I set up the bit.ly link so that I could track clicks on the survey, versus just knowing how many people took it.  Within, and this is not a joke, a few minutes, I had hit my cap.  Whoops.  Within the time it took me to get a credit card into the system, I lost about 150 to 200 clicks.  I would never have known about the survey being closed had @BrianGorbett been on the spot to point it out.

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