I started using personal computers right after college, while teaching junior high school math in the Virgin islands. PC’s were mostly a curiosity then. Many schools felt that they ought to have a couple, but they weren’t quite sure why. So, our school’s two computers mostly sat in the vault. Yes, the vault. They were the most expensive moveable objects that our school owned. Without any real competition for use of these two machines, I was able to spend most of my preparation time, lunch time, and even some class time, teaching myself to program while simultaneously teaching my students how to use and program these machines. It wasn’t long before I became convinced that the PC was the most important thing to happen to education since the invention of moveable type, and that was before the Web, waaayy before. A few years later, after some serious formal education in both Computer Science and Curriculum Design, I founded an educational software company that was later purchased by a bigger educational software company. Early in 2004, after 9 years at Microsoft, I was offered a job with a team of determined and courageous individuals who wanted to start experimenting with open source development at Microsoft. “My kind of challenge, exactly,” I said, and after a few experiments on SourceForge, we were off and running. We wrote open source licenses that our legal team could love, we found another group of courageous individuals at Microsoft who were willing to build CodePlex for us, and we set about training people around the company how to do open source development. I’ve always thought that the more you learn, the better life gets, and this job is no exception.