Scott's path to Microsoft

Scott Hanselman: I was the chief architect at a company called Corillian that did retail online banking. I reported to the chief technology officer (CTO) and shipped a bunch of software called Voyager that ran about a quarter of America's retail online banking.

I built a big distributed system that was like Kubernetes, except that it was written in C++ and ran on Windows. I also wrote the .NET software development kit (SDK) wrappers around it, so I was in the open-source .NET community early on.

Then I helped to introduce open source to banks, which was challenging because large banks don't usually like open source. I had to deal with the General Public License (GPL) and others. This was in the early 2000s, so people were really tense about free and open-source software (FOSS) versus open-source software (OSS). We'd go to a bank and hear, "No, we don't want to have open source here because we're afraid that you'll have to make the whole bank open source." We would work through those problems. We didn't have pull requests at the time, so it was all Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and Subversion (SVN), but we'd do diffs and patches to log4net and so on.

I happened to be at an O'Reilly conference called Foo Camp and I saw two Microsoft people: Steven Sinofsky, who was getting ready to do Windows 8, and Scott Guthrie. I talked to them both and Guthrie was looking at Ruby on Rails. He was thinking about doing a Model-View-Controller (MVC).

I said, "Hey, this is exciting. I've been doing web forms and open source. Let's see if we can make .NET on Nails." That's what I wanted to call it, but it ended up with the name ASP.NET MVC. We started by making a web framework open source and then other things open source like the C# compiler. We slowly peeled the onion layers away until we eventually open sourced everything and today we have .NET Core, which runs basically anywhere.

Geertjan Wielenga: Did you go to conferences and talk about those developments?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, I had already been talking at local user groups. I'm a big fan of developer advocates doing the same thing that stand-up comedians do: you work at a small bar, you do some open mics, and you move your way up to the big rooms. That's often how it's done.

I think that people should come to developer advocacy in the same way. It's amazing, by the way, if you can go from never speaking before to speaking at a large conference like Velocity, but not everyone can do that. So, perhaps speak at your company, then at a code camp, then at a regional code camp, and then at a large international conference.

I was enthusiastic. I don't think of myself as an advocate as much as a professional enthusiast. I'm just really stoked about software. Even sitting here, within hand's reach I have a robot that I'm working on and a microcontroller that runs .NET. There's also a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster on my desk. This isn't advocacy work; this is just geekery.

You've got to be a huge dork to care about this stuff. I've got half a dozen laptops on my desk and two 3D printers. How can you not be excited about software right now? What a time to be alive! I'm overflowing with enthusiasm about software. I'm not paid to go and do any of this. My job is to own the .NET Foundation and to make sure that we do open source right. Speaking is basically a side gig. Microsoft also does have a group called the Cloud Developer Advocates; they're like our main conference speakers.

Geertjan Wielenga: What's your relationship with them?

Scott Hanselman: I work with them and coach them, but I'm not one of them. I was here early on, so I encourage them to engage with the community in an authentic way. We had a conversation recently about whether or not someone should do paid talks. I don't know how it works with your advocacy, but I don't do Microsoft talks and get paid for them. It's not appropriate or ethical. If you're a consultant, you can do paid talks and that's great, but an employee shouldn't be doing that.

Geertjan Wielenga: You're working for this large vendor and going up on stage, so one way of looking at it is that you're a shill for the company or a spin doctor. What's your take on that?

Scott Hanselman: I've actually got "Microsoft Shill" on a couple of my slides. I then try to show the audience that I'm not a shill by doing the opposite of what they expect.

Geertjan Wielenga: Would you agree that once you're seen as just a marketing person, you're done?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, in the past I had a lot of impostor syndrome. In the last three or four years, I've finally become comfortable in my skin. I can say with a little bit of ego that I'm good at this. I definitely have street credibility because people know what I won't talk about.

There are certain things that I've just stayed away from and in dodging those things, I've gained some credibility. If I say something is cool, it's probably because it's cool and not because Microsoft is paying me to say that. I don't think I've ever gone on stage and talked about anything that I didn't think was important; that's just not my style.

Geertjan Wielenga: People often don't realize that developer advocates at the large vendors have a choice of multiple different projects that they could be working on. You may be hearing the company line, but it's most likely something that that particular person has chosen because they're enthusiastic about it. Would you agree?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, and I think people forget how big these companies are. Right now, we have a political issue because one person at Microsoft wrote some dumb stuff and it's all over the news. 130,000 people work for Microsoft, as I mentioned. Statistically, that will include some racist and sexist people.

There are definitely assholes at this company, but there are assholes at every company.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you're on stage on a Monday morning and during the previous week the company that you're representing did something damaging or questionable, you're still the ambassador. Have you had experience of that?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, think about how it felt before Satya Nadella joined Microsoft. Even today, someone can do something stupid before you get on stage and suddenly it's your fault. We're doing great stuff with open source, but when someone does something stupid with Android patents, we get asked about it. It's got nothing to do with any of us, but it becomes a challenge. That's extremely frustrating.