[Long, rambly post follows. It may provide some insight into why I haven't been posting as much lately as I have at some times in the past.]
Lately I’ve been working harder than I’ve ever worked before with some of the smartest, coolest people I’ve ever met on one of the most interesting projects I can possibly imagine. My team at work, MSN Search’s Multimedia Search Team just shipped a beta release of our Image Search product and boy-oh-boy was all the hard work worth it!
Before I go any further, if you haven’t seen it, go take a look. Start at http://www.live.com and type a query into the search box at the top of the page. Press enter and then click the Images tab. I think you’ll like what you see.
One of our primary goals was to fix the rough edges that every other image search UI today share. We wanted users to have a clean, uncluttered display of as many thumbnails as possible with the ability to quickly see metadata for the images that they cared about, and to be able to continue to browse images while looking at the web pages underlying their search results. Based on the early feedback, it would appear that we succeeded.
But back on how cool the project and the people are. I’ve been working anywhere from 60 to 100 hours per week for the last 5 months with short-lived periodic breaks, but I feel more energized than I normally do even during less insanely busy weeks. I was starting to get nervous that Jennifer would give up on me, but she was very supportive, and I think she likes to energized-by-work me well enough to put up with some amount of personal deprivation. (I’m sure that near the end, she was starting to feel strung along and wondering if it’d ever end–we had a couple of times during the long push where we thought we had a ship date picked, and then something would go wrong to set us back by an indeterminate time. But she stuck with me, and I really appreciate her supportiveness.)
Almost without exception, the people on the project are some of the best I’ve ever worked with–cool under pressure, smart about all the things that matter, hard-working. I have to give special credit to my boss and our program manager. My boss Hugh is excellent at both the technical and the people side of things. It seems effortless for him to keep our team focused and working hard. Our program manager Julie is phenomenally smart and has a knack for keeping everyone outside our team aware of what we need and working hard on our behalf.
We have many more great plans for both Image Search and many other projects lined up, and we’re already working hard to bring even more cool stuff to the world. Hey, team, let’s keep kicking butt!