Hello

You’ll be seeing some more posts from me here soon so wanted to quickly say hi. My name is Martin Woodward and I’ve just moved over to work on CodePlex team here in Microsoft as the PM. I’ve been part of the CodePlex community since May 2006 (3 years before I started here at Microsoft) so it’s very bizarre to be come work behind the curtain. Previous to coming to the CodePlex team I worked on the Git support in TFS and Visual Studio as well as working on Team Explorer Everywhere – the Eclipse and Cross-platform client to TFS. I’ve been and continue to be a contributor or maintainer on various open source projects around the internets, doing some fun things in various different languages. In fact the commit that I’m most proud of in an open source project  isn’t actually one that is hosted on CodePlex at all - it was just a small bit of code I knocked up as a weekend project and then contributed to the PDE project in Eclipse. Basically it enabled some Java code to rewrite the eclipse.exe launcher on 64-bit versions of Windows at a binary level, injecting a custom icon as part of a Java based build process. It was just a small fix to an arcane bit of code that manipulated the Portable Executable file format at a binary level in Windows. This was just a raindrop in an ocean of code written that day. Yet because I took 5 minutes to attach the patch to a bug report the code has lived on for years and is still being used by organizations all over the planet, and beyond (NASA use PDE based tooling when dealing with nuclear powered, laser toting robots in outer space – how cool is that!?! )

I normally work remote from a field in rural Northern Ireland but have been in the US visiting the office this week as you can see in the picture (yes despite the site rebrand I was glad to see we still have that flag). I’ve been getting up to speed with the CodePlex codebase and the architecture of the servers behind the site and I was just part of my first CodePlex deployment that included some of my own minor changes. I’m looking forward to doing some more substantial changes in the future. More importantly I get to do my own little bit to work with others who are supporting the open source community to be awesome. Exciting times ahead, but in the meantime if you have feedback then please do not hesitate to create an issue on the CodePlex site or ping me direct @martinwoodward.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2013
  Hi Martin, looking forward to seeing some great Codeplex improvements, it is already heading in a good direction, with the integrations to other web services, like Twitter etc. having arrived recently. I host all my Projects on Codeplex, and have been watching it develop from TFS/SVN to now using HG and GIT + many improvements to issue tracker, wiki editing etc.

• Anonymous
  September 01, 2013
  And here I can "I knew you when..." :) Congrats my friend! I think this is going to be a awesome match...

• Anonymous
  September 07, 2013
  Welcome.Could you please ensure that that all images on this blog have alt text or if they are just decorative include an empty alt attribute to make screen readers ignore them. I am blind and when an image does not have text or an empty alt attribute, screen readers readers read the image's file name instead, which is meaningless and confusing.

• Anonymous
  September 07, 2013
  @Tim, you bet. I'll review the shiny CodePlex template I've inherited and make sure all the decorative images are suitably marked up. When I place images in the editorial content (such as me looking giddy to be stood next to the famous CodePlex flag) I'm normally pretty good at leaving textual description, but let me know if and when I can do better there. Many thanks.

• Anonymous
  December 22, 2014
  The comment has been removed