Maddy Mondaquila (new .NET Aspire PM) talks programming tools

This is a wide-ranging, occasionally delightfully foul-mouthed, and brutally honest interview with PM Maddy Mondaquila of Microsoft. Kudos to them for letting their best people do these kinds of informative and insightful interviews.

MAUI Lead Leaves to Work on .NET Aspire (and interview with Maddy Mondaquila) by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

At 45:57,

“[…] yesterday Dave [Fowler] and I were fighting about if the Visual Studio .gitignore is getting dumber and he was like, ‘who cares about that? Why would anyone care about that?’ And I was, like, it’s 400 lines, dude. Like, we’re ignoring things from […] code-coverage tools that were deprecated five years ago. And then, finally, I start sending him screenshots, and he’s, like, wait, why is that in there? Why is that in there?”

At 49:00,

I absolutely loved the shout-out to “A Year without Santa Claus”. The plot summary was both accurate and possibly better than the actual movie (except for the musical number, which is worth the price of admission). I’m going to remember that Heat Miser vs. Cold Miser analogy.[1] Working in a company where most people didn’t grow up in the U.S. will make it an uphill battle to use it effectively, but I will not be discouraged.

At 51:49,

“Maddy MondaquilaThe more I’ve gotten to understand what customers are doing and talk to people and seeing the convoluted things that people do to develop an app, the more … I think I probably say once a week. I don’t know how anyone ships software. I don’t know how any of this stuff runs. This is all crazy to me, because everything is duct-taped together. Like, it is terrifying and you onboard someone and it takes like two weeks to get them to be able to run the app on their device.

“Like, what are we doing? What are we doing as a society? This is embarrassing.

“We should be able to do more than this and so that’s the thing about Aspire that excites me. We’re not trying to blackbox anything, right? We’re not trying to say, ‘oh, you use this and then your vendor-locked into this thing.’ It’s very much, like, we’re just trying to help you get off the ground and then you can grow out of it.

“I had done a lot with App Center […] and my fundamental issue with it […] was that you couldn’t grow up into a big-girl Azure service, is what I used to say. Like, once you hit the limits of apps, you had to start over and I was like, with Firebase or something, everything’s actually just gcp and when you’re ready you go into a big-girl [service], Google’s like, you’re ready, you move on.

“And so, Aspire was built with that in mind. Like, if you use Aspire for orchestration and then you use the client Integrations to do your databases, then at some point you’re, like, you know what? I actually don’t like the way that they’re setting this up. I’m going to do it my own way. You don’t rip anything out. You just keep going.

“And so that was like a really really big sell for me early. And then deployment was a whole other world that I did not understand and the more I’ve looked at it, I don’t, … again, I don’t know how anyone gets anything done. DevOps is insane. […] trying to bring that theory of, like, grow-out-able-ness instead of just replacing into deployment has been a very, very fun challenge to try and like tease apart.”

At 1:11:26,

“[…] we were talking to the Dutch police force and they are a completely polyglot shop so they have people running every language and there was one Java guy that came and and he was, like, so, like .NET’s, like, open-source and stuff now? And I was, like, yeah. And he was, like, but, like, really, like, it doesn’t have any ecosystem around it? And I was like what? YES and, like. there are real, like, expert, smart developers out there who just have no idea.”

This nearly deliberate ignorance about other programming languages, about tooling, about technique—it’s pervasive. There are people who care, and really want to find better combinations of tools and techniques to do their jobs better, to do what they love better. But there are just as many who just can’t even begin to imagine that there are other languages out there, that there are newer versions of the language they use available, with features that would actually be useful to them. These features are provably useful. They make your code more resilient, readable, and maintainable. They do not care. They don’t even know that they don’t care. They stopped learning a long time ago. Their curiosity is stunted.

It’s a pleasure watching people like Maddy and Nick discussing something that they’re passionate about. I’m passionate about that thing too, but it’s mostly because I understand that there is a good way of doing something—writing tests with MSTest and their bog-standard assertion library and no test-case-generation infrastructure—and a better way of doing something—writing tests with NUnit and their elegant assertion library, excellent error messages, and myriad ways of producing test cases. On the other hand, I keep a watchful eye on .NET’s new testing infrastructure that allows you to pre-compile unit tests as executables. This works for NUnit, too, so it’s a win all around.

That’s just one example but it sets the tone. People can’t explain why they don’t think they need ReSharper. They might not! But they have no idea why. They can’t explain why they use VSC instead of WebStorm. They have no idea that the latter actually supports a useful multi-file renaming refactoring whereas VSC still struggles to do a useful rename within a single file.

Everyone should be appalled and bitterly disappointed but, instead, they don’t even notice. They have no idea what they’re missing. So they don’t miss it. No wonder LLMs could catch up so quickly.