About Us
Who we are
Hi, we're Microsoft 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 :)
The Team
From left to right: John Montgomery (Group Program Manager), Andy Sterland (Program
Manager), Alpesh Gaglani (Developer), Tim Rice (Developer), Suzanne Hansen (Program
Manager), Steven Wilssens (Program Manager), Vinay Deo (Engineering Manager), Michael
Leonard (Test Developer), Jianchun Xu (Developer), Dan Fernandez (Product Manager),
Adam Nathan (Developer), Wes Hutchins (Program Manager), Aaron Brethorst (Program
Manager), Paramesh Vaidyanathan (Product Unit Manager), and Murali Potluri (Developer).
Not pictured: Sriram Krishnan, Jacqueline Russell, Patrick Wong, Ben Anderson, and James Lissiak (which is a pity, because they're cool)
Vinay Deo
Big strategic guy, boss for dev and test, still writes code.
Alpesh Gaglani
Alpesh is one of our front-end and back-end developers, maintainer of the web page builder, and an all-around nice guy.
Suzanne Hansen
Suzanne writes specs, works with other teams from across Microsoft, writes code and fixes bugs when dev needs it, helps our customers figure out what's going on, was a good enough person to write our help docs and do our screencasts (she has our eternal gratitude for this), helps find bugs when test needs it.
Wes Hutchins
Wes works on our team's other product, the incredibly popular and free
Visual Studio Express development tools. Wes owns releasing our Visual Studio Express product and while his work changes weekly it includes things like fixing bugs, coordinating the day-to-day activities of shipping software, and planning engaging content for our Express customers. Outside of work you'll find him enjoying the Seattle nightlife, snowboarding our nearby "mountain" known as Snoqualmie, or traveling around trying to find an alternative to the plentiful overcast skies for which our lovely city is known.
Sriram Krishnan (blog)
Sriram couldn't decide what we should write about him, although he does want you to visit his blog at
sriramkrishnan.com.
Michael Leonard (blog)
Michael keeps us honest and manages our test infrastructure.
John Montgomery (blog)
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 Nathan (blog)
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.
Murali Potluri
Murali is primarily focused on back-end development, maintains our databases and does a bunch of other stuff.
Tim Rice (blog)
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.
Jacqueline Russell
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.
Andy Sterland (blog)
Andy Sterland 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.
Paramesh Vaidyanathan
Big strategic guy, and also frequently distracts Program Managers.
Patrick Wong
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.
Jianchun Xu
Jianchun works on Popfly Explorer, maintains a number of our social networking features and just celebrated the birth of his second child :).
Ben Anderson (blog)
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
James Lissiak is our second token british guy and currently single-handedly manning our Popfly Canada operation.