About Us
Hi, we're the Popfly team, part of Microsoft's Developer Division. You might remember us from such products as Visual Studio, Expression Studio and Microsoft Bob! (Not really on the last one.)
More specifically, we're the Non-Professional Tools team and we build software that enables new programmers, hobbyist, and non-programmers to make and
share their work. Our team's vision is to democratize software development by making it approachable to anyone and everyone, even people who want to create without having to write code.
We believe that if you can send an email, you should be able to build and personalize your own website, mashup, game, social networking site, or blog.
Thanks for taking the time to learn more about us and Popfly. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we do. :)
John is the keeper of our schedule, big strategic guy, and the consumer of much coffee. He was an alternate in the little-known 1973 national competitive coffee brewing team.
Adam built the mashup designer and game creator, but now enjoys watching other team members make them better every week! He's also the author of critically acclaimed books such as WPF Unleashed, Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, and .NET & COM.
Andy robs code from the rich and gives to the poor. As the token British guy, he frequently incorrects our spelling. He spends his time drinking Game Fuel and dreaming up cracked-out features. When not working on Popfly, Andy spends his time getting pwned by n00bs on Xbox Live.
Sir Tim Rice wrote the lyrics for many critically acclaimed works, including: The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, and Les Miserables. Furthermore, he invented mercury and Prozac. You probably owe him royalties. The Tim Rice on the Popfly team, however, did none of the above. He spends his time writing ECMAScript instead.
Patrick Wong is in charge buying camera lenses as well as cutting code on several other important aspects of Popfly, though he would like to say he has nothing to do with the ecard feature.
Supplanting Patrick as the newest and therefore (possibly not by Patrick's account) best member of the Popfly team, Ben joined up just in time to help with the Popfly Game Creator. If you see him walking funny in the hallway, don't worry, he's probably just trying to figure out a good way to simulate the physics of jumping.
James Lissiak is our second token British guy and currently single-handedly manning our Popfly Canada operation.
Scott is the quiet guy, fueled by milk and passionate about noise cancelling headphones. He focuses mainly on the backend of the Popfly site so if you run into any performance issues feel free to drop Andy a line.
Adrian is yet another token British guy who's come over to work on the user experience and evangelism side of Popfly. You can book him for presentations, parties, and any other event we can crash to selflessly promote Popfly. Standard accoutrements include an authentic posh English accent and permanently messy hair.
Jacqueline is our Beginner Champ and works to provide learning materials to non-developers who are trying to understand what
try {this.mymethod(myparms);} catch (Exception) {throw new myException(myparms);} could possibly mean. She's also a big advocate of getting more women and kids interested in software development. In the 3rd grade, Jacqueline used to be able to swing from the monkey bars taking them 3 at a time. Eventually, she gave up her monkey-bar-swinging career to come to Microsoft and help people find as much joy in coding as swinging from monkey bars.
The only fundamental truth in software development is that every talented, hard-working, and agile development team is required to have a marketing guy to slow them down. Enter Sam. When Sam isn’t droning on about the internet tubes, mission statements, or Web 3.0 you can find him perfecting his impression of Samuel L. Jackson reciting Ezekiel 25:17 in Pulp Fiction. The path of the righteous man...