Open Source Story Time: How and Why the Microsoft Developer Blog Turns Elite Developers into Storytellers

Corporate tech blogs offering case studies and how-to guides can sometimes stick to a pretty conventional approach when recounting development projects. For that reason, it’s only natural that first-time contributors to the Developer Blog often have in mind write-ups that don’t truly satisfy our blog’s less customary aim, which is to tell a story.

On the Developer Blog we author so-called “code stories,” and the instructions we editors give for how to write one of these often entail some reorienting and disorienting guidance for Microsoft developers. First, we remind them that stories are narrated primarily using the past tense – “Yesterday, I awoke with a scheme to get rich. I spent breakfast devising my plan, then rushed to my neighbor’s, hoping to secure a business partner.”

The goal, of course, is not to patronize some of the world’s most gifted engineers, but rather to push them a bit beyond their comfort zone, to ask that they author a technically substantive blog post that doesn’t really fit the customary mold. ‘What then,’ they inevitably ask, ‘are we trying to do with the Developer Blog?’. The truth is that our Developer Blog platform can be characterized as much by what it aims not to be as by what it aims to be.

Firstly, it’s not meant to be a traditional marketing tool. We aren’t looking to merely wow readers by recapping seemingly flawless development projects or showcasing finished products. Nor is a code story meant to be a how-to guide. While project frameworks are shared on GitHub, on our blog we aren’t just outlining an already refined process for building a comparable solution. To the contrary, we’re interested in documenting – in narrating – the whole messy process of development: we want to recount the uncertainty and deliberation, the brainstorming, the testing of theories, the failures as much as the successes. Far from a case study or a reference architecture document, we want to recount the whole journey from initial obstacle to plan, back to the drawing board, and finally to solution. We call them ‘Code Stories’ because they are stories.

On the Developer Blog we tell stories about the innovative open source collaborations that  Microsoft and its 800-person Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) organization have done coding shoulder-to-shoulder with customers. CSE engineers spend from weeks to months at customer facilities, solving their most pressing and unique challenges and meanwhile building a unique degree of trust with these partners – all of which makes their work a particularly rich source of material for our narrative approach. By recounting these projects as stories, we’re especially able to both reflect upon and celebrate the power of open source collaboration and Microsoft’s commitment to it. Detailing everything from the root of the problem to the seed of the idea, and all the trial and error, we not only demonstrate the power of the finished product but we can really illustrate the tenacity, flexibility, and creativity of these open source collaborations.

Moreover, a full story helps to highlight the real-world significance of the obstacle being tackled. The background context offered by a story helps to remind our readers that the projects are undertaken for the sake of overcoming our partners’ most urgent obstacles. It also helps to put into perspective what we’re achieving in tackling head-on the most high-stakes, high-rewards projects.

In the end, our narrative approach is unique in much the same way as CSE’s commitment to open source collaboration. And we, of course, take this approach as a way of assisting CSE in its big missions. Beyond providing our partners with immediately workable solutions to pressing problems, our blog and the CSE team are using the open source approach to inspire. It’s about solving a specific problem, and it’s also about openly and collaboratively tackling issues that are representative of more general obstacles in a given field or industry. Through our work, we’re looking to inspire and invite further open source collaboration and iterations from others. 

A belief in OSS is a belief in sharing, and in the power of a collaborative approach to have a big impact. That’s the spirit guiding our work, and that’s the philosophy guiding our stories.