Recently I had the opportunity to share stage with some brilliant internal and external colleagues advancing open source in the cloud at //build, Microsoft’s developer conference in San Francisco. Beyond having been able to talk to about 400 attendees about how we’re approaching open source in the cloud, how customers are building open source applications in Azure and much more, speaking at //build had a very special meaning for me.
Before joining Microsoft, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to the Microsoft developer ecosystem, the Microsoft subsidiaries themselves or the employees working there. I was focused in a number of open source projects such as Canaima (Venezuela’s national distro) a number of communities and expanding a small open source system integrator in the region.
Most of my interaction with Microsoft was limited to public debates, at industry events or in Congress, or to the ISO/IEC 29500 discussion back in the days (both of which I’ve covered in this blog, in Spanish) However, around 2009 or so, the company I was a CTO for and Microsoft decided to create an Open Source Interoperability Lab in Venezuela. The idea was to document common hybrid technology use cases (such as Samba-based DCs in Windows environments, or PHP and ASP.NET communicating via ESB) and transfer that knowledge to customers.
As a result of that effort, I ended up being invited to and participating in PDC09 in Los Angeles. PDC was the precursor of //build, a yearly conference aimed at Microsoft-centric developers. There are 3 things I remember clearly from PDC09: one, was the “convertible tablet PC” they offered attendees (running Windows 7 bits that rapidly became Debian bits), the second one was the PHP SDK for Azure, and the preview access to that new “cloud” thingy, and the third one was an open source roundtable led by Miguel de Icaza that mainly talked about governance and CodePlex.
While I didn’t know it back then, a lot of the things discussed in that roundtable influenced my decision, about a year later, to join Microsoft and work in open source strategy; a journey that brought me to Azure in less than 5 years. But I digress, and that whole story deserves another post.
Maybe some of the attendees then foresaw that Microsoft would end up acquiring Xamarin, or that attention would be put in non-CodePlex initiatives, like GitHub. What I really didn’t expect was that all of that new reality would converge into a PDC-like event, less than 10 years after. This year at //build it did, and then some.
For me, speaking at //build was a humbling opportunity to reconcile the many worlds increasingly pulled together by the force of open source. From the announcements to the content and all other metasignals at the conference, it was incredibly exciting to see this transformation manifesting itself within Microsoft’s developer community.
It highlights the importance of leaving no one behind when we explore new paradigms and technologies in the cloud, and how every individual in the open source community can exert change in this industry.
