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BUILDING 17 • REDMOND, WA USA • 25 June 2019
At Microsoft today we have almost 25,000 engineers participating in our official GitHub organizations for open source, a great number of them contributing to open source communities throughout GitHub. It's been quite a ride: that's 10X the engineers we were working with when I posted in 2015 about our experience scaling from 20 to 2,000 engineers in the Azure open source org.
As a member of Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) team, it's been exciting to be a part of this growth, and I wanted to take some time to write down some of the investments we have made so that others could get a peek inside.
Using data gathered through an open source project I'll mention in this post, I was able to query our GitHub entity data to create this chart of Microsoft's public repos created since 2011:
Some of our employees have always been on GitHub, contributing to projects, sharing their ideas and insights. Many of our teams are new to social coding and working in the open, and look to OSPO to help provide documentation and guidance.
We have engineers who are busy contributing to projects all over GitHub, donating their time and code or entire projects, many I am sure enjoy working with open source in an official capacity, others after hours, or just hacking away. Looking at the contributors to virtual-kubelet, a project that's part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, I see familiar names of people I've worked with.
The Visual Studio Code team has been on fire, moving at a fast pace for years. There's an entire community of awesome people from around the world on GitHub every day opening issues, performing code reviews, and contributing code to VSCode.
These teams are finding new ways to communicate, to build consensus and governance models, and to invite maintainers into the fold.
In this post, I will cover:
I'm going to be focusing more on the tactical approach we took to enabling GitHub at scale and not any specific project's experience - though I hope to track down and share the experiences that projects like the Terminal, TypeScript, Accessibility Insights, and the Windows Calculator have had.
We work hard to build the right experiences so that engineers have everything they need, without the OSPO team getting in their way.
It should be no surprise that open source is a big part of what has helped us to scale, and we continue to give back and contribute where we can:
Looking forward, we have a lot more work to do to focus on developing our capabilities - evolving our maturity models around what healthy and awesome projects look like, helping graduate work into the community and to foundations, and continuing rapid iteration, experiments, and learning from all of this.
I'm so excited to see where we are at in another few years, and encouraged by the collaboration happening on open source projects across the industry, the developing communities around specific Microsoft technologies, and all the random contributions that Microsoft engineers are making to open source all over GitHub as their teams take dependencies on and get involved in the associated communities.
To encourage the right behaviors and teach Microsoft employees how to use GitHub and participate in communities, we've identified a number of tenants or principles that we try and use in everything that OSPO does specific to our tooling and approach.
For example, we encourage teams to work in the open on GitHub, getting to learn the tools and lingo.
We'd rather remove a complex process to reduce the work our engineers need to do if it is not providing the right return or value.
If we need to ask teams questions about the project they want to release as open source, we focus on what problem we're trying to solve, and we have been able to eliminate questions that we used to ask, after thinking through the outcomes with stakeholders and advisors.
Looking back five years, we used to have a number of manual registration systems where engineers would let us know what open source they use. These were often free-form text fields, and many teams would only take a best-faith effort to share that data.
Today we've been able to eliminate many of the registration scenarios by detecting the use of open source in many scenarios across the company, just asking follow-up questions or going through reviews for certain projects when necessary or needing more information.
Eliminating process is not always possible, but if we continually ask questions about the workflows and guidance, and ask the teams using these systems to provide feedback and suggestions, hopefully we'll test the edges and eliminate where possible.
At scale, we cannot be a roadblock, and we trust and encourage our engineers to learn through experience. We want to make sure users learn about GitHub teams, and how to request to join them.
There is no possible way that we would have been able to get 25,000 people collaborating on GitHub so quickly without building a self-service experience whereby our engineers could join our GitHub orgs at their pace as they have a need to learn and participate.
Traditionally, a GitHub invitation needs to be sent by an org owner to a specific username or e-mail address, and that just would not work well at our scale, without being in the way of our engineers. Thanks to the GitHub API and our GitHub management portal, things are smooth.
Whenever possible, we want to provide documents, guidance, and other reusable resources, instead of having to rely on special knowledge or process that has manual steps.
Our office provides guidance and resources to help advise Microsoft businesses in their approach to contributing to, using, and releasing open source, but we leave the business decisions with the particular business.
Decisions such as whether to release open source go through a question/answer experience, and the outcome is either automatic approval, or a business approval workflow that kicks off, allowing a team's business and legal representatives make the final decisions and choices.
We also have begun deputizing "open source champs": people who can help spread the good word and provide opinions and advice to their teams about how to think about open source.
Open source centers around collaboration, but one of the challenges today with GitHub orgs full of many repos is identifying what teams have access to accept pull requests or administer settings.
While GitHub shows a lot of this data if you start with the Teams view in an org and drill into a specific team, there's no view for a given repo's teams, unless you're an admin for that repo.
For all of our repos, releases and reviews,
Thanks to this, out of the 1000s of repos, it's relatively painless to find the right contacts for a project inside the company.
Engineers should learn how the GitHub interface works, how pull requests and reviews, issues, forks, organization teams, and collaborators function.
Whenever possible, we hope that our users go directly to GitHub to manage their teams, configure team maintainers, welcome new community members into their projects as maintainers or contributors.
While we do have separate internal interfaces and tools, these ideally augment the native experience. We've built a browser extension that our users can install to help light up GitHub to make it easier to find employees, resources, or internal tools.
It's important to us that engineers learn the GitHub fork and pull request model for contributing, as we strive to use a similar experience for "inner source" work.
Our engineering team has made many technical investments to help scale the company to be able to participate in open source better.
Whenever possible we want to use open source to make open source better and share those learnings and contributions for other companies and individuals to use.
We'll invest in our own tooling when we must, but look to the marketplace and work that others are doing on the horizon: we are excited to see GitHub's Enterprise Cloud product evolve and drive new features and capabilities into the product to make enterprise-scale open source easier.
Today we host an instance of an open source project for Contributor License Agreement (CLA) management, integrated with GitHub, called CLA Assistant. This allows us to make sure that people contributing to our projects have signed the appropriate CLA before we accept a contribution.
Once the CLA for an entity is signed once by a community member, they can then contribute to all other repos, so it's really a relatively low burden that helps keep our lawyer friends happy.
CLA Assistant is an open source project that was started by SAP and is licensed as Apache 2.0.
We've contributed to the project functionality to help with scale issues and rate limiting, automatic signing to handle when employees join and leave the company, and are excited to be able to support a new class of corporate CLAs thanks to contributions made by others to that project.
In 2017 we migrated to this new open solution from the in-house CLA bot that we abandoned. I really like how the VSCode team messaged this to their community with a GitHub issue (#34239).
The system is powered by GitHub org-level webhooks, so it is "always on" and teams do not need to worry about whether their repos are protected with the CLA and ready for contribution.
GitHub provides useful information including traffic stats, contributor info and other breakdowns at the repository level.
Across Microsoft's open source projects, however, we have a need to be able to slice and dice data looking for trends over time, analyzing investments at scale, and so realized early on that we needed to import all of the available data we can from our GitHub open source releases into our own big data systems such as Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Explorer.
Newer GitHub Enterprise Cloud features look to help provide organization insights, and we're super excited to give those a try to augment the other data and insight methods we are using today.
Here are some of the projects we've used, created, or collaborated on.
Our team is one of the sponsors of the GHTorrent Project, an effort to create a scalable, queryable, offline mirror of data offered through the GitHub REST API. The repo is at github.com/gousiosg/github-mirror.
This data, similar to GHArchive, helps learn about the broad collaboration happening on GitHub.
We donate cloud compute resources to the project run by Georgios Gousios who kicked off the project with ideas and collaboration with Diomidis Spinellis.
At Microsoft, we ingest the data into Azure Data Lake to be able to run interesting queries and learn more about trends and happenings beyond our campus.
GHCrawler is a robust GitHub API crawler that walks a queue of GitHub entities transitively, retrieving and storing their contents. The initial project launched in 2016 and evolved significantly at the TODO Group tools hackathon in June 2017 while working with other companies to abstract the data stores to support other technologies and stacks.
The crawler taught us a lot about the GitHub API and how to be friendly citizens by focusing on the caching of entities, the use of e-tags, and being careful to not repeatedly fetch the same resource.
Different from GHTorrent, the crawler is able to traverse Microsoft's own open source organizations using tokens that can peer into our current GitHub team memberships, retrieve info about maintainers, configuration, and private repos, and so is very useful in answering operational questions about the growth of GitHub at Microsoft.
We ingest the data from GHCrawler into both Azure Data Lake Azure Data Explorer and use that data in Power BI dashboards and reports, live data display on internal sites, and other resources.
The chart of new repos at the top of this post was created by querying this crawler data as stored in Azure Data Explorer. Here's a query that returns repos created in the official Microsoft organization in the last 30 days (that are public):
Since the data comes from GitHub but is stored internally, teams can make use of the data for their own business needs and interests, without having to worry about GitHub API rate limiting, the specifics around collecting that data, and just being able to focus on using the data effectively to solve business problems.
A favorite resource for many teams looking to build new communities is the data around pull requests and issues, and also collected traffic API data. Since GitHub only provides a 2-week window of consolidated traffic info, storing the data in our big data tools helps us look at trends more easily.
ClearlyDefined is an Open Source Initiative (OSI) project that has a mission to help FOSS projects thrive by being "clearly defined". The lack of clarity around licenses reduces engagement that ends up meaning fewer users, fewer contributors, and a smaller community.
Communities choose a license for their project with the terms that they like. Defining and knowing the license for an open source project is essential to a successful community partnership, and so ClearlyDefined helps clarify that by identifying key data such as license set, attribution parties, code location, and when the data is missing, curation can help.
Microsoft contributes to the effort and is making use of the data to help provide license clarity in the tooling used to help teams understand their use of open source.
As of June 2019, ClearlyDefined has over 6.3 million definitions. These definitions are created by running tools such as licensee, scancode-toolkit, and fossology tools across oodles of open source.
Another TODO Group project OSPO collaborates on is repolinter.
Given a source repository, you can run repolinter to learn basic information that can help inform whether a project has all that is necessary to incubate and build a healthy community, such as
We hope to be able to share this data in a more visible way to help teams see where they can make simple improvements, or even by automatically opening pull requests if they are missing the essentials such as a mention of the Code of Conduct.
We've collaborated with Amazon and use their amzn/oss-attribution-builder project to help build open source license notice files to help teams meet their legal obligations.
Microsoft's GitHub management portal that employees to use, detailed in my 2015 post on the portal, handles:
Here you can see an experience where you can search, sort and filter repos across all of the many GitHub orgs in one place, improving discoverability.
The portal itself is open source and has been rebuilt and refactored over the past few years to try and be more useful and to allow other companies to use it:
The repo is on GitHub at microsoft/opensource-portal.
While we have a very liberal and friendly policy to make it easy for an engineering team to decide to share some code such as a sample, we do want to make sure that there's a process in place that includes a business decision and legal team approval if there's a major release being considered.
Microsoft has chosen to turn off the "Allow Members to Create Repositories" option on our open source GitHub organizations.
Instead, we have our own "new repository wizard" within our GitHub management tooling. This site collects information about the purpose of the repo, the common GitHub Team permissions that will help a group of engineers get off and running, and then populates the repo with the standard Microsoft open source content such as Code of Conduct info in the README, an appropriate LICENSE file for the project, and the original purpose and use of the repo, for data reporting purposes internally.
To make this experience easier to find, we work to educate people through documentation and tools such as the previously mentioned Open Source Assistant web browser extension. The extension is able to light up the green "new repo" button on our orgs and link directly to the wizard, providing a better user experience than the "you have insufficient permission to create a new repository" message that our users would receive on GitHub otherwise.
The outcome of the repo wizard will be the creation of a public or private repo on GitHub.
We ask, by policy, that teams only use our open source GitHub orgs for work they are going to ship within the next 30 days.
The outcome of the new repo wizard is either auto-approval to make a project public, or the kick-off of a business and legal review process, to help comply with policy, and inform leaders about important open source decisions that are being made.
We have an internal service called the Usage Service that creates a work item in our work item tracking system (Azure Boards), and assigns that work item to the appropriate legal and business reviewer. The work item is then passed along, with fields or more info being filled out, discussions are had, and eventually the review will be "final approved" and ready for teams to ship their project to the world and go build that open community.
Here is a screenshot, redacted of the details and names, showing the work item for the release approval of the Windows Calculator:
After the final approval, an automated e-mail is sent to the original requester with any guidance from the various reviewers involved in the process, to help them understand any notifications, legal obligations, or other work that needs to be done to support their release.
Internally we ship a browser extension that lights up GitHub with Microsoft-specific information and guidance.
Since a GitHub username may not be related to a person's recognized corporate identity, the extension lights up the more common corporate alias inline throughout GitHub - pull requests, issues, people profiles.
By highlighting other Microsoft employees on GitHub, people who use the extension are able to dedicate additional focus on a good collaboration experience with the community, while easily being able to better identify their coworkers on the site.
The extension helps people to continue to use the native GitHub experience, while augmenting bits and pieces where we've made decisions around our GitHub org settings, such as disabling New Repo creation direct on GitHub.
The extension also is also to provide links to policy around open source, link to the 'new repository' wizard.
Since we disable native repo creation on GitHub in order to ask engineers to complete our wizard to learn more about their intent with their open source release, we often would get support questions about how to create repos, since GitHub would display the message that the user could not create repos.
Now, this is what they see:
In another sceenshot, you can see a "Join" button that lets an employee self-service join the GitHub organization through our GitHub management portal:
Finally, since we want teams to use our official GitHub org that is configured automatically with the CLA system, with compliance tools, audit logs, and the ability to manage the lifecycle of when users join and leave, we do not allow teams to create new GitHub orgs for open source.
By updating GitHub's "new organization" page, we have a chance to let people know about the policy and other resources before they get too far down the road of trying to setup yet-another-org.
The extension works Firefox, Chrome, and the new Edge based on Chromium. Microsoft employees can learn more and install the extension at aka.ms/1esassistant.
While this extenson is not open source today, if others think it could help their organization, I can see what we can do.
We've implemented jobs that do everything from keeping data and caches up-to-date to helping make sure that we have confidence in the membership of our GitHub organizations.
These jobs are all open source, implemented in TypeScript, as a part of the opensource-portal repo.
Connected to HR data sources, we can react when an employee leaves the company. In a big company, people are always changing roles, trying new things, and sometimes they leave for other opportunities.
We unlink people when they leave: removing the association between their GitHub account and their corporate identity, and removing their GitHub organization membership(s).
We welcome former employees to continue to contribute and participate to projects where they should continue to be maintainers, but for clarity, do not allow them to remain as org members.
We also send an e-mail to their former manager, so they have confidence that the right things have happened with permissions and system access.
To help enable operations, support, meet security obligations, and light up bots such as our CLA system, we have a set of GitHub teams that are automatically and permanently added to every repository in our GitHub orgs, when the job is configured.
By monitoring the GitHub event bus, the job adds what we call system teams to a repo the instant a new repo is created. And, if a repo admin tries to remove or change the permissions that such a system team has, the job automatically restores its permission.
An occassional cronjob also runs to validate and reenforce these teams as needed.
As the number of members in a GitHub organization grows high, you'll also start to see very large teams.
We have teams such as "All Employee Members" that are designed to give easy read access to private repos that are being finished up and polished before going open source.
An unintended side effect we found: some people wanted to just give "all members" administrative access over their repo, to make the act of onboarding get much easier.
Trouble is, with admin comes great power, and any of the thousands of members of the org could then delete the repo, change whatever they want, override branch protections, etc.
This also would automatically subscribe thousands of people to spammy notification messages, depending on their GitHub notification preferences.
As a result, we have a "large permissions" job that monitors for grants of write or admin access to an org-defined "large" number of people. Once such a grant is made, and the team is too large, the job will automatically downgrade the permissions to try and prevent mistakes, and then send an e-mail address to the person who made the permission choice, hoping to educate them about the risks and help them understand what changes were made.
GitHub allows users to change their username. This is excellent: many people start with a cute screen name or other indicator, then realize they're professionally developing software with their peers in the industry, and often want to change that username.
Not all users know that they can rename their account, so we do get people who delete an account, just to create a new one.
However, the majority of GitHub apps and APIs work off of GitHub usernames instead of the integer-based user ID.
To help stay ahead of this, we have a cronjob that looks up GitHub users by ID and then refreshes our internal data store of those usernames, in the hope that we can improve the API success rate and reduce support costs when renames happen.
For critical operations, additional logic has been added to GitHub apps to anticipate the potential of a user rename happening, and being able to smartly attempt to fallback to looking up the user first by ID, or alerting and sending the issue to operational support.
We have a cronjob that sends updates about new changes and interesting happenings on GitHub repos. These are typically only send to repo admins, to not spam too many people.
The digests are personalized to the receipient, and cover scenarios such as:
More important than the technical tools and hacks we put in place, the programs that we run in the Open Source Programs Office help drive process improvements, awareness of features and capabilities, roll out new functionality, and to emphasis the work that is happening in the open in new ways.
Here's a set of the OSPO investments we have been making or put in place to help drive improvement in the open source maturity level of the company.
We have a central documentation repository that is easily accessible to employees where they can read through guides on how to go about releasing open source, or contributing to it. The hope is that teams new to many of the tools and approaches in open source can refer to the material, share it with others, and help us to scale this to others.
Here's a rough look at the outline of some of that material. In time I hope we can prepare a version of these docs to share with the world…
- General Information
- What exactly is Open Source?
- When and why Open Source
- Can I use it?
- Misconceptions
- Bad Practices
- Benefits
- Use
- Overview
- Security and vulnerability management
- Copyleft obligations
- Code signing
- Attribution guidelines
- Business review process
- Required notice generation
- Automated registration of use
- Contribute
- Contribution overview
- Forking repositories
- Business review, if required
- Release
- Release overview
- Checklist
- Copyright headers
- Foster your community
- Build and publish your project
- Code signing
- Business review, if required
- Data and Insights
- GitHub insights
- Registrations and request insights
- GitHub information
- GitHub overview
- Accounts and linking
- Repositories
- Teams
- Organizations
- Transferring and migrating repos
- Service accounts
- Two-factor authentication
- Apps, services and integrations
- Large files, LFS
The team prepares a monthly newsletter to all interested parties in the company, including all linked GitHub users, with a distribution north of 25,000 members. As a low-frequency resource, the hope is that the newsletter helps provide useful information without inundating teams.
Typical newsletters will include 3-5 topics and updates of note, some data or graphs and charts of adoption and community health, and the date for the next open source meetup.
A monthly gathering on the Microsoft campus (or online), the meetup is a quick event that starts off with networking, a quick lunch, and then 3-4 speakers who share their recent open source experiences.
This helps connect people, have interesting conversations, and build community.
A cross-company group of people who "get it", these are some of the best open source minds at Microsoft, who have connections, experience, data, and can help drive best practices and advise on situations.
The champs primarily get involved in a specific discussion list in the company today, but hopefully in time they will also be able to help share information with their organizations, and build a two-way conversation channel with more stakeholders and businesses across the company.
The champs will be a key part of helping us continue to scale and share and get subject matter experts connected with the right teams as they open up.
OSPO offers an internal support experience, with internal mail, a Teams channel, and other places, to help support people as needed.
The most common issues tend to be helping people find the documentation for what they are looking to do, pointing them at the GitHub account linking experience or new repo wizard, or helping answer policy clarifications and questions.
Not all questions can be answered by OSPO - we do at times need people to reach out to their legal contact for their organization to support their request.
It is also super important to us that we update internal docs and tools when we learn of gaps or improvements that can be made, so that the next group of people with the same need will not need an escalation or support incident to help answer their question.
We look to our principles around delegation, self-service, and elimination to help reduce support cost, solving problems before they grow too large. A clever hack or targeted fix often helps a lot.
Appointed executives from across Microsoft's businesses make up the majority of the "OSS Exec Council" that meets at least quarterly to discuss progress on evolving the culture, being available to advise how their groups are contributing to open source, and otherwise helping provide a conduit with leadership, the open source champs, and our open source office. In many ways, this group is the "board of directors" of our OSPO team and we look forward to helping to tackle whatever is next as a company in this space.
Having this in place helps us take the temperature of leadership of where to spend our effort and how to think about complicated issues and how to make things friction-free for our engineering teams who want to contribute to and use open source everywhere.
We're also available to brief business leaders and others on their approach, share the learnings others have had, and strive to remove roadblocks with all teams.
We've learned a lot, and continue to learn as we scale the open source adoption across the company. Many of the specifics learnings I've had relate to how we operate at scale, how much we can set teams free with tools and access, and how to help others learn from the experiences.
Just a few short stories…
GitHub is super real: we finally had our own "Bedlam" incident earlier this year… we had a GitHub team inside one of our largest GitHub orgs called "All Members", to make it easy to quickly give access to private repos ahead of the launch of new work at events.
The idea is that as long as you give 'all members' read access to the repo, they can then fork and submit pull requests, making it easier than trying to figure out what teams may grant them the rights they need. It also encourages the more open contribution model we love.
GitHub Team Discussions shipped in late 2017 and essentially were not very frequently used by our open source teams for quite a while.
Finally, one quiet day in January, it finally happened…
… someone posted a message to the "all employees in this org" team discussion, immediately going out to a lot of people … and then someone posted about how to update your notification settings … and then it spiraled out from there.
Along the way we learned a few things:
Old time Microsoft people smiled a lot. Bedlam was a classic Microsoft learning lesson. It's fun that we can still have similar experiences with the modern developer toolkit, too…
A surprising amount of our internal support traffic comes from employees who unfortunately lose access to their GitHub accounts.
Since we require our users to use GitHub's two-factor authentication, and this is a separate two-factor system than the Azure Active Directory multi-factor auth that our employees also use, it's easy for people to get confused, or to lose access to the GitHub side of things.
Thankfully, GitHub does a great job of helping remind people to save their two-factor authentication codes and to encourage other technology such as the use of U2F devices.
Everytime a new iPhone model comes out, our support volume spikes… a lot of people use two-factor authentication apps on their phone, but then forget to store their backup codes or anticipate that wiping their phone and upgrading to a new one may not always restore what they think it may.
I strongly recommend that everyone have a YubiKey to help make things easier when using GitHub on a daily basis.
Most GitHub REST v3 API calls operate on GitHub username as opposed to user IDs.
GitHub allows users to change their username, which means that if you are not also validating what their current username is, you could find that a few API calls are not working for a particular set of users who have changed their usernames.
There is a GitHub API that can take a GitHub user ID and provide you the current user information response, so you can hit that occassionally, such as in a daily job which also respects e-tags and caches responses, to make sure you have the accurate username before calling operational APIs.
At scale, we tend to see about 25 user renames per week at Microsoft right now.
The GitHub API's conditional request guidance is good, but many libraries or users of their APIs do not seem to use them by default.
As long as you keep a cached version of the entities you request, you can use
the e-tag and an
If-None-Match header to help reduce your load on the rate
limits for GitHub. A request with the existing e-tag, to check if the entity
has changed, will not count against your rolling API limit if it has not changed.
It's great seeing more and more libraries such as octokit/rest.js supporting this concept in various ways, or having extensibility for it.
Be nice to GitHub's API.
Whenever possible we strongly encourage that the repositories that Microsoft governs use team permissions instead of granting individual permissions.
GitHub Teams support multiple team maintainers, helping projects evolve over time, and making it easier to keep access and admin permission assigned as needed.
We've had to do a lot of user education on this topic: if someone opens a support ticket needing access permissions, we will never grant them individual permissions ("Collaborator" on GitHub) to a repo, but instead will ask them to help us find or create a new Team on GitHub for that permission assignment to go to.
** Team permissions. Teams with maintainers. Avoid individual permissions.** This helps keep things sane. Very sane.
As previously mentioned, our GitHub management portal shows all employees all the permissions for teams, including secret teams. Since we are focused on enabling open source on GitHub, this helps answer questions people have about who has access to administer or change settings on a repo and reduces support volume.
On GitHub you can natively see, given a team, which repos and permissions it has, if you are a member of the org. However, you cannot see easily from a given repo who the teams are.
Transparent data in the portal reduces support costs around the "404 these aren't the droids you are looking for" experience on GitHub: since GitHub will return a 404 for a repo that an org member does not have access to, we used to get a decent amount of support traffic from people asking if the URL they were sent by a team member was real or not.
Before we spent a few billion dollars on GitHub, we had paid GitHub organization accounts at various pricing tiers for our open source GitHub orgs: we needed private repo access for people getting ready to release their open source.
Early on we would have a bunch of people running around with corporate cards and expensing GitHub. Over the years we were able to consolidate this spend and bring sanity as the GitHub use scaled, and also to help use that as a forcing function: by centrally funding the official GitHub organizations for open source in the OSPO team, we were able to make it easy for teams to get going without having to worry about billing or setting up new organizations and systems.
GitHub offered a really useful annual invoice payment method, so instead of having to worry about using a corporate card or other payment method each month, we would just submit a single payment for a set of GitHub orgs, then process that for payment. GitHub sales was super helpful and friendly.
The only minor issue we've had with this is the few times that we had to make changes to the LFS data packs for an org during the year… we would solve this by approving the purchase order for GitHub to include some additional buffer, so that GitHub sales could just invoice us for the additional data packs as needed.
Before we used the invoice payment method, we did use corporate credit cards as needed and approved by our finance team; it was nice that we could associate a Billing Manager or managers to the orgs to help manage that without having to worry about permission to be org owners or control the resource itself.
Kudos to the friendly GitHub sales and their supporting staff - they were always willing to jump on a Zoom video conference call and work through the details, such as when we were signing the Corporate Terms of Service agreement for some of our orgs.
GitHub's annual invoice payment option is really straightforward and can help you reduce random one-off corporate card expenses.
Many Microsoft teams love to ship the org chart, but when it comes to reinforcing Microsoft's open source releases, we prefer all repos to go in our few main organizations.
This also helps make it easier for engineers to get going: they do not need to identify both an org and a team to work on a repo, they just need to know the repo name or team details.
By policy and reinforced in our tooling and other systems, we have asked people to just use the official Microsoft GitHub org since early 2017.
This has been super important by providing a really straightforward way for people to get access and not worry about cross-org permissions or finding things. We also know that product names and teams change so often that these things just would not scale. While the GitHub rename features provide some flexibility to orgs and repos, we would prefer not to change too many things at once.
Newer GitHub features such as an enterprise account announced in May sound really useful to help address this in the future: if you can combine compliance and billing together, perhaps it will be easier to have additional organizations where it makes sense.
Build a strategy around how many GitHub organizations your organization will have for open source. The answer might be 1.
We're continually learning from people! People are great.
Microsoft is super crisp on the requirements to ship products and services: the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) helps team to be mindful of security and how to build and ship software.
As a company, our products also have requirements around code signing, packaging, localization, globalization, servicing, accessibility, etc.
Shipping an open source code project (a repo) is a little less involved, but teams still need to do the right thing.
Our policies around releasing source code are more about business purpose and approval, making sure governance information and LICENSE files and READMEs are in place, and that teams are ready to support, build and evolve a friendly open community.
We've had a few learning situations where teams thought that the full set of requirements to release a product - such as localizing in many languages - were required to release an open source repo.
For now, we emphasize to teams that projects are not products, but often, they compliment one another, and sometimes, they literally are the same thing.
Products and services are very different from open source code. That's OK. Tell your friends.
Forking is a big deal in the open source world. There are times where a fork is the right evolution or move for a community to evolve, but we've found that some teams view forks as the way to contribute upstream.
For example: if someone wants to contribute to CLA Assistant, one approach would be to fork the repo to their individual GitHub account, and then to submit a pull request to that upstream project. Another approach would be to fork the project to the official Microsoft organization, prepare changes, and then submit it as a pull request.
While the second example makes it clear that this is very much a Microsoft contribution, it creates confusion, because Microsoft just wants to participate in the upstream project, and not fork it in any hard way.
We strongly encourage teams to simply fork and submit pull requests, the GitHub way, from their individual accounts, not from the official organization account.
We want teams to always contribute to the upstream when possible and only fork as a last resort.
Forking can be a big deal. Upstream is the right place to contribute.
Since we set the e-mail address
opensource at microsoft as the e-mail address associated
with the official Microsoft organization on GitHub, we get a lot of e-mail traffic from
people looking for help with issues and products.
Within GitHub, if you're browsing a repo and click "Contact GitHub" in the footer of the web page, it essentially asks whether you are looking to report a GitHub issue or an issue with the repo. This helps reduce issue/support traffic to GitHub for open source repos.
GitHub then offers the e-mail address associated with the SUPPORT files for the repo, or falls back to the org-wide e-mail address. So… we get a lot of e-mail.
We've learned to improve spam filters and use templates and work to address issues, but we do get a lot of mail.
Expect that support will need to happen.
On the entertaining side, many passionate users of long-time Microsoft software regularly write in to ask us to open source their favorite projects…
It's great that people really want to see this, but I think a lot of folks do not always understand that commercial software often has many dependencies or licensed components that may not be open source, or the code requires a very specialized build environment, etc.
I do love seeing the historical releases to share code, such as the original winfile.exe or old-school MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0! Hopefully teams will find the time to share when it makes sense. It's also a reality that historical software releases are not a place that will be easy to build an active collaborative community around unless a clean mechanism exists to release and build modern bits.
Open source all the things
As outlined in Build like an open source community with GitHub Enterprise, Mario Rodriguez from GitHub highlights how the features that help make GitHub great for open source can also be super useful for any organization.
We've started moving to GitHub Enterprise Cloud for more of our open source organizations and I'm excited to see what our engineering teams will do with these new capabilities.
A few capabilities in particular that we're starting to use include:
Available in beta now for Enterprise Cloud accounts, you can take a look at the high-level trends around new issues, closed issues, and other key specs and data points for all of your repositories across the org.
Another nice view is the "where members are getting work done" look at where time is being spent on GitHub by everyone contributing to the org.
Especially interesting to teams like .NET which have a large amount of activity and maintainers, new roles beyond the classic "read/write/admin" on GitHub means that they can appoint Triage users (can manage issues and PRs, but not push code directly to the repo) or Maintain users (additional settings on top of issues and PR management).
Moving issues between repos used to be done by third-party, unofficial, or random tooling, and now that GitHub directly supports issue movement, we're pretty happy to see this additional option open for communities who have issues spanning multiple repos.
GitHub has an audit log API beta for Enterprise Cloud customers now. Using GraphQL, this means that we will be able to keep an audit log copy in our systems for review, analysis, and without the manual or cumbersome approach required today to either ingest and store webhook information in an append-only data store, and/or parse the JSON and CSV versions of the audit log for a GitHub organization.
We have a lot left to do and our journey will continue to get more interesting as Microsoft continues its open source adventure. Some of the things the Open Source Programs Office will be thinking through will include…
As a company we will continue to work to evolve our take on a "maturity model" for open source organizations, and I can't wait to see what is next.
Similar to the Open Source Guides at //opensource.guide created by GitHub, we'd love to share, to help others in the industry learn from our progress.
Playbooks around how to think about open source, making business decisions related to open source, all are fun topics we would love to share our learnings and take on.
We may also be able to share our docs, or a version of them, with the world. Major kudos to Google who already shares their open source guidance and policies on their site.
We are starting to look at ways to draw attention to contribution opportunities, such as highlighting up-for-grabs issues across our releases, and also recognizing when our employees contribute to open projects outside control of the company, too.
By updating the opensource.microsoft.com site, we hope to be able to tell good stories and share useful information about what our teams are up to.
As a short-term experiment, we are listing "up for grabs" issues right on the homepage of our open source site, to learn about whether people find that interesting.
Here are open source GitHub repos mentioned in this post. Check them out!
Hope you found this interesting, let me know what you think on Twitter. If you were expecting a short or concise post, you may have clicked on the wrong thing…
Jeff Wilcox
Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft Open Source Programs Office
Jeff Wilcox is a Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), helping Microsoft engineers use, contribute to and release open source at scale.


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Thanks what do you do for a living? I do medical coding/billing so I kept my hair up for most of the part of my journey but since they are more mature and neater looking I wear them down sometimes. Thank you for your kind words.
I have not used the wax in a long time, guess I should explain it all in one of the ignorant newbie "Learn from my mistakes" threads. The work was really sloppy and a few started to unravel on their own. A good deal of the interlocks are still there but just a few "twists" were done per dread. I tried to undo as many as I could, but I simply couldn't get all of them out except for one dread (my longest & favorite).I don't feel I could trust the original or any other "loctitican" for that matter to work on my hair. It is what it is now and I'll just deal with it and the all future breakage and what not as it comes along.I should also explain that I work in healthcare. I know mature dreads would be more acceptable as they appear neat, clean and orderly. Appearance is understandably very important in the healthcare field, and that was my reasoning for going to a "professional" to get them started. As much as I personally enjoy the process, I just have to shorten the "messy" period as much possible, hence the wet right-after-the-shower palm rolling. It's not vigorous or very much, but I do have to keep them as neat & orderly as possible. I am already a "proven" asset to our team and so I have been allowed this grace to grow them out. But unless they are matured and neat I have serious doubt I could obtain future employment in their current state.I keep bound up and cover them up as much as possible with headcovers or dreadbands as a compromise with my manager. I know that's not the healthiest choice so I let them loose once I get home.I do use a quick sea salt spray once in while and I wash them 1-2 times a week. I used Knottyboys shampoo bar & will be switching to Dr. Bonner's bar as soon as I can find them locally. I like the idea of a shampoo bar as I can really scrub my oily scalp. I dealt with itchy scalp long before my dreads, and scrubbing it really good always helped.Now that winter is coming I'll be switching to wool for my headcovers & dreadbands. Any other advice as to "accelerating" the journey to mature looking dreads would be much appreciated. Thank you again Soaring Eagle as your site gave me great hope a few months back when my journey looked so bleak.
nvrmnd i see your 6 months in looks like the interlocking undid itself?
welcome\dont palm roll
remove the wax with wzx b gone from www.dreadlockshsampoo.com
interlocking is a horible mistake!
u may be better off starting over if not too far in
welcome but do not use wax wax uis a dread killer and a scam
read the dreaducation page and the dread wax ytuth page
if your bf used wax read the wax removal page too
wax is the number 1 cause of dreads being cut
it makes them gross
but read the info here for yourself
welcome but do not use wax wax uis a dread killer and a scam
read the dreaducation page and the dread wax ytuth page
if your bf used wax read the wax removal page too
wax is the number 1 cause of dreads being cut
it makes them gross
but read the info here for yourself

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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With the end of the year approaching, the Hot One Hundo is featuring the #1 hits of 2017 in a weekly feature.
In his 2011 song "Gorgeous," Kanye West rhetorically asks "what's a black beatle anyways?" Little did Kanye know, "Black Beatles" wouldn't only refer to "a fucking roche" or more literally, Billy Preston, it would also be the name of a #1 single by hip hop duo (and nominee for worst group name ever) Rae Sremmurd. After a run of six weeks at #1 during late 2016, "Black Beatles" returned to #1 for one final week at the top on January 14th, 2017.
"Black Beatles" is most famous for being the soundtrack to the "Mannequin Challenge," a popular trend during late 2016 which featured people freezing in place while someone else filmed them in odd poses or situations. Everyone participated in the trend, from sport teams, to media figures, to high-profile politicians, and hell, even McCartney approved of the song by doing a Mannequin challenge himself. and the media had a field day highlighting the increasingly elaborate nature of the videos. It was a dumb trend then, and it remains a dumb trend now. The trend had its few weeks in the glow of popularity before the mainstream media and older generations drove it into the ground and made it uncool to the young whippersnappers in much of the same way that the Harlem Shake or Gangnam Style fell out of favor. Ultimately, the song's popularity hinged on the social prevalence of the meme, alongside the lack of any other high profile songs taking its place at the top, which makes it difficult to separate the meme from the song.
What blows my mind is how fast trends move into and out of popularity. If you said to a friend today "hey let's make a mannequin challenge video lol" the friend would think you were severely out of touch with current trends and would laugh in your face. Trends, and especially ones born on the world wide web, have become even more disposable than they used to be. Or, maybe I'm just getting old and don't understand anymore.
Rae Srummurd comparing themselves to the best band of all time might be one of the most extravagant posturing moves of all time. The lyrics do make it so that being referred to as a Black Beatle is ultimately a complement to the sheer greatness of the band. They reference the fab four directly only a couple of times, but they're easily the most memorable one-off lines of the track, saying that "bitch, me and Paul McCartney related" and "rockin John Lennon lenses like to see 'em spread eagle." But, behind the meme and references to the band, "Black Beatles" is. at its core, another trap/rap song about boozing it up, and making it rain and spending lots of money.
The song is in a genre which really isn't in my forte of analysis – to the experts, it could be the greatest trap song of all time! – but, as a casual listener I'm not a fan. To me, it sounds like almost every other rap song I've heard – the sound effect and spoken word interjections at the end of every line, the lyrical posturing, the downbeat, synthetic instrumentation. It sounds like a pretty generic song that became a hit only because it rode the back of a internet trend, like Bag Raiders' "Shooting Stars." Years from now, all the kids who participated in the Mannequin Challenge will be like "oh that Black Beatles song! Can't remember who sings it. I used to like this song, I guess. I remember making that video for the mannequin challenge with my friends so many years ago. Haven't heard this song in forever. Sounds like 2016 to me."


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Euthanasia advocates are pushing a bill to legalize doctor-prescribed suicide in New York state again this year.
Previous efforts to legalize the life-destroying procedure have failed in the state legislature, but euthanasia advocates are persistent.
The AP reports assisted suicide supporters plan to meet with state lawmakers Tuesday to lobby for the bill, which they say will give terminally ill people the option to end their lives whenever they choose.
The bill would allow adults diagnosed with terminal illnesses to request a lethal drug prescription from their doctor to use to commit suicide. Two doctors would have to certify that the patient is terminally ill before the suicide drugs could be prescribed, according to the report.
However, the legislation is a dangerous recipe for abuse. Medical groups, disability rights advocates and others are opposing assisted suicide bills across the country, arguing that the elderly and people with special needs will be under pressure to end their lives rather than seek treatment.
PRO-LIFE COLLEGE STUDENT? LifeNews is looking for summer interns interesting in writing, social media, or video creation. Contact us today.
According to National Right to Life Committee, problems with the legislation include:
· There is no protection for those seeking assisted suicide because they suffer from treatable depression or any other mental health issue
· Predictions that someone will die in six months are often wrong;
· Abuse of elders and people with disabilities is a growing but often undetected problem
· If assisted suicide is legalized, it will quickly become the cheapest alternative to medical treatment.
The legislation also does not require any medical professional or other authority to be present when the person takes the suicide drugs. Therefore, there is no way of knowing if the person is being forced to take them, and no doctor is there if complications arise.
In 2015, attorney Margaret Dore, president of Choice is an Illusion, explained her concerns about a New York assisted suicide bill to a group of state lawyers.
Dore, an attorney in Washington State where assisted suicide is legal, explained: "In my law practice, I started out working in guardianships, wills and probate, and saw abuse of all kinds, especially where there was money involved (where there's a will, there are heirs). Then, in 2008, I got dragged to a meeting about our assisted suicide law and saw the perfect crime: your heir could help sign you up, and once the lethal dose was in the house, there was no oversight. Not even a witness is required. If you resisted or even struggled, who would know?" She added, "The New York bills have the same problem."
"If enacted, the New York bills will allow assisted suicide (or euthanasia) without consent," Dore said. "And in case I'm being too subtle, the drugs used are water and alcohol soluble, such that they can be injected into a restrained or sleeping person. After the person dies, the death certificate is REQUIRED to reflect a natural death. It's the perfect crime."
Financial issues also come into play. In states where doctor-prescribed suicide is legal, sick people are being denied medical treatment coverage and offered the cheaper option of assisted suicide instead.
Most recently, Stephanie Packer, a California wife and mother of four who was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer, said her insurance company refused to cover the cost of her medical treatment. When Packer asked her insurance company if it would cover doctor-prescribed suicide, the company told her, "Yes, we do provide that to our patients, and you would only have to pay $1.20 for the medication."
Patients in Oregon reported similar experiences.
The New York bill is modeled after assisted suicide legislation in Washington state and Oregon. Doctor-prescribed suicide also is legal in California, Vermont, Colorado and Washington, D.C.


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When I had moved back to New York in 1990, I had a Chinese room mate. And the summer that we had started at Eastman Kodak, his parents had come to visit. His father was a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Hempstead, New York. Okay. We let his parents have a free reign of the kitchen and oh what a glorious decision that was. I cannot begin to tell you all that his parents cooked. All of it was lip-smacking, finger-licking, I-gotta-have-a-cigarette delicious. I can't describe it any other way other than you could actually taste the food. What made it bad was that afterwards I went to Chinese restaurants — rather Chinese restaurants that pander to the American palate — and I was nonplussed to say the least. Ben's parents had spoiled me by whipping up authentic Chinese dishes from the mainland. Beef and broccoli? Kung pao chicken? Szecheuan pork? No, it was none of that stuff that you can find in the frozen section at your local grocer. It was the good stuff and I had then sworn off eating any Chinese food until Ben's parents came to visit. The last time I had them in my kitchen was 1994.
Fast forward to the present. My restaurant adventurous friend and a few others were racking our minds trying to find another restaurant representing ethnicity C that we had not tried. Chinese was always in the back of our minds, but you can find a Chinese restaurant in Chicago on basically every other corner that there isn't a McDonald's or Starbucks. My friend knew someone who has cousins who own a Chinese restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown. The best way to get authentic Chinese cuisine in Chinatown is to go with a Chinese. I always thought that was an inappropriate joke, but my belly can vouch for the fact that going to a Chinatown restaurant with another Chinese and getting the best food is not a joke. So, it was off to Chinatown to meet with Chi and her husband for the real deal.
Dragon Court. Located at 2414 S. Wentworth Ave., we all met up and entered into the restaurant that looks more like a store front with seating for perhaps a few people at most. Once you go in and go around the corner, you soon discover otherwise. The dining room was huge and filled with Chinese dining family style. Yet again, an indication of the authenticity of a dining establishment is the representation of those of the culture and Dragon Court had plenty of it. Having gone with Chi, who was our spokesperson and translator, and there being eight of us in tow, we received preferential treatment — we got the upstairs dining room all to ourselves. That's service.
Having come in from the outside where it was blisteringly hot, we needed something to cool off. So, we started off with water and rounds of smoothies — mango and pineapple, some with tapioca pearls, some without. Delicious. Refreshing. They hit the spot. Then the good stuff started coming to the table. We didn't get menus, as the meal had already been prepared in anticipation of our coming.
First to the table was a serving bowl of bamboo and seafood soup. Soup usually goes over well with me during winter months, and Chicago gets eight months of winter. Three staple soups you get at Chinese restaurants are egg drop, wonton, and hot and sour. This was the first time I had bamboo and seafood soup, and let me be the first to tell you that I will learn Chinese so that I get it authentic style when I go back to Dragon Court. The bamboo has a texture that may seem a little different to some, but it's balanced out nicely by the clams and the thick broth. Because we had the soup served family style, we all spooned from the common bowl until it was all gone.
With the soup finished, it was on then. The waiter brought out broiled and fried fish served over Chinese broccoli. Hello! Not heavy on spices, but incredible on taste, this dish proved that you don't have to laden food with seasoning to make it tasty. Let the natural taste come through. Next up was a plate of crab and lobster. Oh happy day! Baltimore is known for crabs, but the crab we had was so huge and tasty that we can truly say that we've had the best crabs ever. And the last time I had really good lobster was when I was in Montreal and when I used to go to Maine. The lobster was absolutely meaty and basted just enough not to hide the taste, but to bring it out more and into our mouths to which we delighted. The plate of shrimp served over Chinese broccoli was fantastic. Plump. Succulent. Yummy. We swirled the spinner in the centre of the table, spooning something from each entrée so that we could then spoon the good stuff into our mouths to devour.
And if that wasn't enough, the waiter brought out a plate of pork chops with stuffed vegetables and chopped shrimp in a fried batter. Oh my god! You'd think that at some point something would come to the table and we'd all wince because certainly at least one dish would taste nasty. No. No. No. It's wasn't beef with broccoli, orange chicken, kung pao chicken, or something schezeuan. While we were still handling our business of enjoying great food and great conversation, the waiter came back to the table to fill our water, to get us some more smoothies, and then he came back with another dish. This time, it was abalone. Uh oh! This may not be a dish for all people and it's probably one that you'd want to tell someone months after they've eaten it if they're only accustomed to being safe with the food they eat. Abalone is a large sea snail. Cooked just right and served with huge mushrooms in a tasty brown gravy over boiled cabbage, you'd would think you were in heaven. We were and if there is food to be had in heaven, I won't turn my nose up at a dish of abalone.
Now, we had been eating like kings and queens all this time. The spinning board in the centre of the table got a lot of use as we served ourselves and ate of all the good things that the waiter had brought to the table from the kitchen. All along, I kept thinking that I had denounced Chinese food all this time when I could have gone to a Chinese restaurant with someone from China and gotten the real experience. You live and you learn. And you watch in amazement as another dish comes to your table. The waiter brought out our final dish, which was Singapore noodles with shrimp. Hello! We didn't think it could be possible to put any more food into our bellies and after we had finished the plate of Singapore noodles, we couldn't believe we had eaten all the food that we did. This presented a problem because we always have to have room for dessert. Fortunately, the Chinese dessert that we had was not one of those heavy eats that put you in a state of comatose. The waiter brought to us individual servings of sweet beans in a rich gravy. After a few spoons of it, we placed our cups on the table with complete satisfaction.
This experience taught me a few things that I will never forget. The best dining experiences are in a community setting, which has become commonplace in our dinner clique. Trying something that you've never had before won't kill you. Not having a little adventure can be a bore, though. And Dragon Court has spoiled me even more than my room mate's parents did when they had come to visit years ago. For all that we ate, it's surprising that the bill had not come out way more than what it did. With filled bellies, happy faces, and a full appreciation for the fact that enjoying good food is an indication of enjoying life, we knew one thing for certain — we will go back.
Sheh-sheh nee!


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Before mayor-in-waiting Rahm Emanuel unveiled his education leadership team, his advance scouts laid out markers in blue tape on the floor of a high school library to choreograph precisely where everybody should stand.
Emanuel spoke for 12 minutes, six times longer than new public schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard, who was careful not to deviate from a prepared statement. When reporters tried to question Brizard, he kept quiet.
"I'll do the answering," Emanuel declared. "At the right time, we'll have him be available for questions."
The Emanuel era at City Hall begins for real on Monday, but the months-long run-up to the swearing-in ceremony has left it abundantly clear that the city's new boss wants the spotlight to remain squarely on him. And so far that spotlight has revealed a leader who plays up his homegrown pedigree but often borrows from the controlled stagecraft and management playbook of Washington, where he has spent the bulk of his public career.
Beirut by the Lake no more, city government under Emanuel could become Chicago by the Potomac.
After more than two decades of the often unpredictable Richard M. Daley, Emanuel is a study in the kind of caution and focus common to the White House, where he has twice worked. He's mindful not to say or do anything at well-scripted public appearances that might step on his message.
For his transition, the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama hired the same headhunter firm the administration used to field new leadership for General Motors as well as mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae after government bailouts. The fundraising mechanism Emanuel created to back aldermanic candidates is modeled after the ones used by House, Senate and presidential candidates.
A new city budget and economic development council is created in the likeness of a panel of experts Obama and President Bill Clinton relied on to wade through complicated economic issues.
During the mayoral campaign, opponents ripped Emanuel as more a creature of Washington than Chicago, despite representing a Northwest Side district in the U.S. House for three terms. In addition to his work for Obama, Emanuel also served as political director of the Clinton White House.
That resume makes his return to Chicago highly unusual, said Ross Baker, a congressional scholar at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
"Generally speaking, the move is invariably from local to state to federal," explained Baker. "It's a well-worn groove in American politics. The arrows point one way."
Simply put, American politicians tend to have big egos, and nothing strokes that better than Washington, where the problems tend to be cosmic in nature.
That said, Emanuel won't be the first former congressman to run City Hall. Harold Washington traveled a similarly unorthodox political path in 1983. But Washington was a backbencher in the Capitol, while Emanuel carved a major role for himself in national politics and policy.
To Emanuel's way of thinking, returning to local politics can only be a plus in his efforts to turn around Chicago and its ailing institutions.
"We are a product of our experiences," he said in an interview. "I hope I'm bringing a wealth of relationships and contacts to bear down on our problems to change the status quo and bring a level of results we haven't seen."
Indeed, change will be the overarching theme of the inaugural address that Emanuel is to deliver Monday, a speech he said was completed three weeks ago. He said the address won't contain new policy initiatives, but rather will explain in broad strokes his intention to shake up a troubled city government.
A protege of the outgoing mayor, Emanuel has been careful not to criticize Daley by name. Even so, the criticism is implicit.
"We can't keep doing the same things," Emanuel explained. "We've got to start doing things. And we've been standing, at some levels, standing still."
Emanuel was elected Feb. 22, and he has been a whirlwind of activity ever since.
He's unveiled his economic, school and public safety teams well in advance of taking office. Publicly, he declared his intention not to step on Daley's toes. Behind the scenes, he jumped into negotiations for major education reform and helped defuse a feud with airlines over expansion at O'Hare International Airport.
The flurry of activity is classic Emanuel, who jokes that his wife once said if they had had a fourth child, she would name the baby Patience — "maybe as a subtle reminder of the value."
The mayor-elect has attempted to turn his lack of patience into a virtue. He says the city is facing serious problems that have been ignored too long.
Half of city public school students don't graduate from high school, violent crime continues to plague parts of the city and some people have been jobless for years, Emanuel said.
"Now if you think you need someone who is just patient and not ready to break some eggs to get things done, then the 55 percent of folks who voted for me made a mistake," he said last month.
In all the political positions and appointments Emanuel has held, he's always had to answer to someone. Chicago's mayoralty will be Emanuel's first elected executive gig.
Emanuel ranks his new job among the top five executive positions in the country. The others that make his list are president, governor of California and governor and mayor of New York.
Friends are fond of saying that Emanuel's wiry frame belies a dynamo.
"He's a larger-than-life personality, which I think is a requirement for being mayor of a big city, in particular, this big city. So he's big enough for the job," said Obama political guru David Axelrod, who often refers to Emanuel as a "force of nature" and a "heat-seeking missile."
Although Emanuel spent most of his political life in Washington and functioned well there, Axelrod said, at the end of the day one of Emanuel's strengths is that he is more Chicago than Washington.
"He's a very blunt, plain-spoken person. Those are not the watchwords of Washington," Axelrod said. "Washington is a city that is very much occupied with status. You've got many bright and talented people, but an awful lot of time gets wasted on who's up and who's down and who's in what meeting and whose name is on what bill. Rahm is very results-oriented. He wants to get things done."
Emanuel's nearly two years as the White House chief of staff were exhausting and took a toll on his soul, said Clayton Lewis, the best man at Emanuel's wedding. The desk job was isolating, Lewis said, especially as Emanuel dealt with weighty challenges.
Freed from his White House desk, Emanuel is once again able to engage in the kind of retail politics that energizes him, Lewis said.
"There's a sense of peace and solitude when you're in charge," Lewis said. "You're the final call."
Emanuel's relentlessness predates his years in Congress and the White House. He's not afraid of making decisions, said Lewis, who worked with Emanuel at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s.
The pair of 20-somethings were tasked with recruiting candidates to defeat Republican incumbents. Emanuel had a knack for cutting off those who didn't perform well, Lewis said.
"He's wickedly pragmatic. He knows what needs to be done and what can be done," Lewis said. "Rahm gets the art of compromise. But he's going to push it to the edge, and there's going to be some road kill along the way, as there should be."
Chicago's 46th mayor honed those skills as a middle child. From an early age he played negotiator between his two brothers — and sometimes between his siblings and parents.
"He would tell Zeke he was right and he would tell Ari that he was right," said Emanuel's mother, Marsha. "And then he would sort of pull one right point here and one right here and then bring them together."
The people he's going to have to both woo and manipulate now are the 50 members of the City Council. Emanuel started that process in earnest after the election, meeting personally with every alderman and soliciting his or her input on reforms and policy initiatives. Many council veterans say they had not met one on one with Daley for years.
That attention also has come with a request as the inauguration nears. Emanuel asked the entire council to give up part of Sunday afternoon for a two-hour dress rehearsal ahead of Monday's ceremony at Millennium Park. The request took some aldermen by surprise — Daley's last swearing-in was so low-key it was held in the City Council chamber.
With the final draft of Emanuel's address completed early, he has had plenty of time to practice a speech expected to touch on themes similar to his campaign pledges of safe streets, strong schools and stable finances.
"I'm very clear about what it's going to take to write the next chapter in Chicago's history," he said. "Now is a down payment on everything I pledged."
Twitter @ChiTribCloutSt
Before mayor-in-waiting Rahm Emanuel unveiled his education leadership team, his advance scouts laid out markers in blue tape on the floor of a high school library to choreograph precisely where everybody should stand.


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We've decided to cancel tomorrow's already rescheduled meet. The coaches are scrambling to come up with a plan, but the earliest possible reschedule could be 01/25. More later. Hang in there. See you at practice whenever we get back.
Jan 17
Meet #3 Cancelled … Again!
Permanent link to this article: https://kbowl.mistergweb.com/crgl/meet-3-cancelled-again/


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A sharp, stabbing pain wakes me from a dead sleep and I whimper in pain. In my sleep, I had tried to shift on my side, which caused the pain in my ribs. This fucking sucks; I never sleep on my back, only on my stomach or my side. The doctor said it would take about six weeks for my ribs to heal. How the hell am I supposed to sleep on my back for six weeks?
I grit my teeth and pant quietly until the pain subsides. I turn my head in the darkness of the bedroom and see Sookie sleeping on her side beside me. I smile as I look at how adorable she is. She looks so angelic with her hands resting underneath her cheek. Her braided hair is over her shoulder, with the end resting in the valley of her breasts. I still cannot believe that I am here with her. Last night, I thought Sookie would have taken me back to my house, but she said her hotel was a better idea.
True to his word, Bubba got us safely back to her hotel without any of the paparazzi seeing us. Bubba was kind enough to help Sookie get me up to her room. I am not ashamed to admit that I might need to get a wheelchair before this is all said and done. You never realize how much you use your torso until every goddamn thing you do hurts or tires you out.
Reaching over, I pick up the end of Sookie's braid and tickle her nose with it. Her nose scrunches up and wiggles like a bunny. I grin playfully as I tickle her nose again.
"You're playing a dangerous game Buster," Sookie says in sleepy voice. One eye opens to stare at me with a mock glare. "You know I don't wake up in the best of moods and I'm not fully functioning until I have my coffee. Are you sure you want to poke the bear?"
Because it's me, my mind instantly goes to the gutter even though her words were completely innocent. "I have something I'd like to poke you with." I lick my lips hungrily and take the end of her braid to caress along the tops of her breasts that are not covered by the camisole she sleeps in. "I seem to remember that an orgasm works better than coffee to wake you up."
Sookie smiles wistfully as she grabs my hand to make me stop. "I remember. But sweetie I don't think you're in any kind of condition for us to be thinking about sex. I'm too afraid of hurting you. Hell, I would have slept in the guest room last night if you hadn't pouted like a child until I gave in."
I drop her braid and turn my hand so I can link my fingers with hers then pull until our joined hands rest over my heart. "As much as I want to be buried inside your tight, wet heat again," I begin in what she used to call my sex voice, "I don't want to rush it," I finish somberly. "There is a ton of shit still hanging over of our heads. When I do make love to you again, I want it to be perfect. I've waited this long to be with you, I can hold out a few more weeks." I lift her hand to my lips and kiss it sweetly.
Sookie smiles at me and scoots closer so her head lies on my shoulder. She is careful not to jar the bed too much so I won't be inadvertently hurt. We lie in silence, enjoying the nearness of each other. It's such a little thing but it brings me a strong sense of peace and happiness. I am starting to doze off when I feel Sookie shifting to get out of our bed.
"Don't go," I mumble drowsily.
"I have to use the bathroom, and then I'm gonna take a shower so I can run out. Do you need to get up before I go in? I don't want you straining yourself," Sookie says in her best mom voice.
"No. Why do you have to go out?" I don't like the idea of her leaving me. I know she isn't leaving me as in leaving me, but it still makes me nervous. If I could, I would super glue her to my side.
"I need to get you some clothes, so I thought I would go to your place. I'm sure Alcide wants to know how you're doing," Sookie says as she comes around to my side of the bed.
"M'kay," I say as my eyelids flutter closed. I feel Sookie's lips brush against my forehead and I drift back to sleep with a contented smile on my face.
I don't know how much time has passed when I wake up again, but I hear muted voices coming from the living room. Unfortunately I have to get out of bed, because I need to pee. I refused to accept the doctor's suggestion of getting a bed pan so I could do my business. I still have a shred of pride left.
"Ok, you can do this," I say to psyche myself up as I lower one leg to the floor. I brace my hands against the bed and push my body up, trying to take some of the strain off my ribs. It still hurts like a mother fucker, but I manage to get myself sitting upright. I take a few minutes to wait for the pain to subside then shuffle slowly to the bathroom. After I do my business and wash my hands, I open the bathroom door to find Sookie standing in our bedroom.
"You should have called me," she admonishes. "I would have helped you get up.
"How long was I asleep?"
"Almost four hours. I managed to go to your house and get most of your stuff. Alcide helped me pack. He's actually here with me, said he wanted to check up on you. Do you want to come out to the living room or take a shower first?"
"I'll shower later; I don't know how long that's gonna take. Where's my bag? I want to put on something more comfortable." The only clothes I have with me are the clothes I wore last night.
"I put your bag in the chair by the window," she says while pointing her finger. "Do you want me to get something out so you don't have to bend over?"
"Boxers, a pair of sweats, and a t-shirt are fine," I say with a sigh. She rummages through my bag, pulling out the items I requested. I nod my head in approval of her choices because I don't really care about what I'm wearing. It's not like I'm walking the red carpet today. Sookie sets my clothes on the bed and smiles at me nervously.
"I'll give you some privacy so you can get changed." Her cheeks flush an adorable shade of red and her eyes won't focus on me; instead she's trying to look everywhere but at me. I wore only my boxers to bed and that's what I've stood in since coming out of the bathroom. Even with the bandages, bruising, and cuts on my body, Sookie is still attracted to me. It's the same reaction she had to seeing my naked torso in my trailer. She never used to react this way to just the sight of my chest, but maybe it's because it's been so long since we've seen each other's bodies. Granted, she could be wearing a fucking trash bag and I would think she is the sexiest thing I've ever seen.
"Sookie look at me," I command. She complies reluctantly, and she unconsciously bites her lower lip. I grip the door frame tightly seeing that because my body begins responding to hers. The rest of my body is throbbing in pain; let's add my cock to the mix. Why the hell not? The air between us is electric; I swear I can feel the air pulsing and humming with our sexual attraction.
"Would you mind helping me get dressed? I don't want to bend over and hurt myself," I say with puppy dog eyes. She knows it's a ruse and I know she knows, but she isn't going to call me out on it. Instead, she tells me to move beside the bed so I have something to balance myself against.
Coming up behind me, Sookie slides her dainty hands in the waistband of my boxers at my hips and begins slowly sliding the cotton fabric down my legs. The feel of her hands and her warm breath floating over my skin has me clenching my hands in fists at my sides and a certain part of my anatomy twitches eagerly. My teeth are grinding and my jaw clenches otherwise I will be saying all sorts of wicked things to her. Why the hell did I want her to help me? All I'm doing is giving myself the worst case of blue balls imaginable. Sookie taps each of my feet so I will step out of my boxers. She rises to her feet, her hand brushing against my ass as she walks to the closet, throwing my boxers in the laundry hamper. My head turns and my eyes follow her every move. They are the only things allowed to move now otherwise my hands and lips will be all over her body.
When she turns back to face me, her breath catches as she takes in my nude form for the first time in years. Our eyes connect and I see that hers have darkened, the cornflower blue becoming midnight in color. Sookie takes her fill until she shakes her head, trying to shake the lust from her brain. I wish it was as easy for me to clear the lust from my body, but the only way I can be rid of my erection is to take the matter in my own hands…literally. With determined steps, she stalks forward, grabbing my clean boxers off the bed and drops to her knees in front of me to help me get them on. I groan in response; I know she isn't doing this intentionally. But Goddamnit, the sight of her on her knees in front of my aching cock puts all kinds of memories and fantasies in my head.
"I'm sorry," Sookie whispers softly. I grunt to acknowledge her words because I'm trying to ignore that her hands are skimming up my legs and that her mouth is RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Sookie smiles in understanding. Before Sookie slides my boxers the rest of the way up my legs, she pauses to speak to my cock. "Don't worry old friend; you and I are going to get intimately reacquainted soon. I can't wait to feel you sliding in and out of me; take your pick where we start," she says huskily as she slides the boxers up to sit below my waist. Her words make me whimper and I feel weak in the knees. I grab her by the hair and drag her lips to mine for a kiss full of need and anger; my vision has disappeared behind a red haze brought on by her words. I want nothing more than to take her in every way imaginable, bathing my cock in the warm, sweetness of her mouth before moving to plunge inside her tight, wet heat below.
"You're a fucking tease," I grind out against her lips when we break apart.
"Nothing new there," Sookie sasses. "I guess now's not the time to tell you that my panties are soaked because all I've been able to think about is the feel of you inside me, touching me in places no one else can reach. I want to feel you filling me everywhere." Everywhere? Does that mean what I think it means? Dear God, I've died and gone to heaven. Or maybe it's Hell because I'm being denied the ecstasy that I've only ever been able to find inside of her.
I claim Sookie's lips once more in a hard kiss but quickly release her lips before I end up forgetting my earlier claim to make love to her our second "first" time." Go out to the living room and join Alcide while I finish getting dressed. Otherwise I'm going to end up lying down on this bed so you can ride my face for the rest of the afternoon," I say in a lowered voice as I slap her on the ass hard. It's Sookie's turn to whimper with need, but she does as I ask. She slips quietly from the room and I gingerly lower my aching body to the edge of the bed. I need to feel better and soon. There is no way she and I are going to be able to last weeks without some kind of sexual release.
Fifteen minutes later, I find Sookie and Alcide in the kitchen of her hotel room. Alcide is sitting at the breakfast bar with a giant bowl of chips and salsa while Sookie moves around the kitchen making a late lunch for the three of us. She looks up at me with a small smile but goes back to mixing something in a large bowl. Alcide stares at me with a grimace on his face as I gingerly sit in the seat next to him.
"Jesus Christ! She really did a number on you. You gonna be OK?"
I shrug my shoulder and feel a twinge in my ribs. I sigh in frustration because it hasn't even been a day and I'm already tired of being in pain. "I'll live," I grit out. Sookie hearing the discomfort in my voice stops what she is doing and goes to the refrigerator pulling out a bottle of water. She hands me the water with the bag of prescription pills I came home from the hospital with.
"You need to take your antibiotic and you should really take one of the pain pills," she says in a tone that leaves no room for argument.
"I'd rather not take the pain medication; in the past, they've never helped with the pain when I had 'em. All they do is put me to sleep. Do you think I can take Tylenol or ibuprofen instead?"
Sookie shrugs but goes to her purse to get a bottle of ibuprofen. She hands me the bottle before returning to the kitchen to resume making lunch. "It wouldn't hurt you to sleep for a while. You're injured; you're body needs sleep to help heal it."
I pop the top of the ibuprofen bottle and shake out a couple of tablets, followed by fishing out my antibiotic. I guzzle half the bottle of water as I take the pills. "So what happened last night after we left?"
"Well," Alcide says as he chews around a mouthful of chips, "the cops took statements from everyone to corroborate what happened. Lucky for you that someone turned on a video camera the moment Freyda started shouting at the two of you sitting together. Production, I would think, is shut down indefinitely; no one's heard a word from the producers or the director. But TMZ is all over the story; someone must have sent them the video of Freyda being handcuffed and abusive to the cops. Her mug shots are all over the website, and they are reporting that she is charged with aggravated assault, possession of illegal substances, under the influence, and a slew of other shit."
"Did you get my phone and iPad from my trailer last night?" I need to see this website; I need to know what the hell is being spread.
"Of course; I put them in the bag with all the chargers as well as your wallet." He gets up from his chair. "Just stay there; I'll get 'em for you. Point me in the direction of where I need to go."
When I have the iPad in my hands, I hurry to TMZ's website. There it is on the front page: Freyda's mug shot photo and the video of what happened on the set. Sookie stops fixing lunch to come around to my side so we can watch it together. The audio quality is poor; you can't hear much of anything from the distance this video was taken. However, you can see with absolutely clarity that Freyda attacks me and I do not fight back. You hear a scream that must have come from Freyda the second time she tried to attack me, and then the camera works gets shaky as the holder pans quickly to Freyda knocked out on the ground. You never see who knocked her out; all you see are a pair of denim-clad legs. The video ends at that point.
"At least you're in the clear," I say to Sookie reassuringly as I rub her back. Her back had become tense as we watched the video, and I had no idea why.
Sookie looks at me incredulously. "I don't give a shit about bad press Eric. If anything, I'm disappointed it doesn't show me laying that bitch out!" Alcide and I both have to chuckle at that. Sookie places her hands on my face so she can look me in the eyes. "I hated seeing her attack you. I hate knowing you are in pain because of her. And I abso-fucking-lutely hate that our lives aren't completely free of her or that bitch you call a manager. I want us to begin our life together with our daughter," she tells me with her voice full of longing. I kiss her palms; I, too, want nothing more than to begin my life with my girls.
"Soon my love," I vow but then sigh as her words sink in. I still have to deal with Pam. I don't know what I'm going to do about her. Obviously, I no longer want her to be my manager. I can't fucking trust her and I never want to be around her again. The easiest thing to do would be to fire her. Call me a horrible person, but that seems so unsatisfying. I want the bitch to suffer for her actions; I want to take everything away from her that she holds dear.
"You're thinking about Pam aren't you?" Sookie brushes her hand through my hair, scraping her fingers along my scalp and neck in a way that has always soothed me.
"Is it wrong that I want to make her suffer for what she's done?"
"Hell no!" Sookie and I look at Alcide who is bristling with anger. "I don't know how the hell you are being so goddamn calm about everything! I nearly took the bitch's head off when she called me trying to get information on you."
"Why did she call you?"
"Because you weren't answering your phone! I told her you'd gone to the hospital to get checked out and then had come home to rest. She insisted she was going to fly down here but I told her not to bother. I said I would look after you and have you call her when you were up. She seemed put off by my answer, but then she went into full predator mood. Pam said she was going to make everyone pay for not protecting you from Freyda; the studio, producers, hell, probably even the pope himself are going to be on her hit list."
Sookie moves back in the kitchen, taking a bread knife out of the butcher's block to slice open three baguettes she had sitting on the counter. She lines the bread with shredded cabbage and then dishes out heaping portions of shrimp salad. My mouth begins watering and my stomach grumbles loudly as I realize what she's making: shrimp po boys with her Cajun sauce. Oh my God, these things are fucking amazing! She used to make these for me when we lived in New York and they were my absolute favorite. The rolls would be shipped up to her from her family down here in Louisiana, because she insisted that the rolls available in New York didn't taste the same. Large shrimp would be cooked with garlic and Creole seasoning, then the shrimp is mixed in a spicy mayonnaise mixture that I could never figure out what was in it. I've spent years searching for someplace that could make this sandwich for me. Despite all the great restaurants in New Orleans, I've never found a shrimp po boy that tastes as good as the one Sookie makes for me. She seats one of the heaping sandwiches in front of me, and another in front of Alcide. Both of us eagerly dig in; the only noise in the room is the sound of our chewing.
"I have an idea," Sookie says as she picks at her sandwich. "I don't know if it's something that we can carry out, but I think I know how we can take everything away from her." Alcide and I listen eagerly as Sookie outlines her plan. We offer suggestions to refine the idea in some spots, embellish it in others. By the time we are through, if everything goes according to plan, Pamela Ravenscroft will be exposed for the narcissistic bloodsucker she is.
Recipe for Shrimp Po Boy can be found here.


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Integrated Device Technology (IDT) has unveiled what it calls intelligent, scalable, distributed power management solution for portable multi-core application processors. IDT has used its patented technology to add incremental output current without modifying the controller power management IC (PMIC) to overcome PCB routing and thermal challenges in powering processor chips.
IDT says its scalable solution minimizes development time and risk with a single PMIC that can be re-used and re-optimized to support the evolving power requirements of various processor platforms. In addition, the distributed nature of the add-on power sources offers tremendous advantages for point-of-load regulation, circuit board routing, and thermal distribution, adds IDT. IDT suggests this solution for advanced portable devices, such as tablet PCs, clam shell devices, smartphones, ebooks, high-end digital cameras, client solid-state drives (SSD), and set-top boxes. The IDTP9165 PMIC and IDTP9167 companion power source are IDT's first devices to offer this technology, claims IDT.
"IDT's scalable approach to power management brings a new level of performance and flexibility to the fast-paced market of consumer portable electronics," said Arman Naghavi, vice president and general manager of the Analog and Power Division at IDT. "When our customers design a new platform of portable devices, it's difficult to predict exactly how much output power will be needed to optimize each system. As a result, PMICs are typically overdesigned, making the systems costly, inefficient, and physically larger. By providing our customers a flexible power management platform to mirror the needs of their processor platform, they can now focus their attention on a single PMIC, and simply scale the output power to optimize each system. In addition, this modular approach offers invaluable thermal benefits by allowing the designer to spread the power dissipation across the board – a serious challenge in today's ultra-compact portable devices."
The IDTP9165 includes five integrated synchronous step-down DC/DC regulators, 11 LDOs, a real time clock (RTC), a 10-bit ADC, multiple GPIOs, and a high-speed I2C interface.
IDT explains the below advantages and features of this power solution:
"The IDTP9167 add-on power sources are controlled by the IDTP9165 PMIC, allowing the designer to command up to eight external devices as though they were integrated into the main PMIC itself. Each optional device efficiently provides up to 6 A of additional peak current, distributing heat across the board and greatly simplifying PCB routing and stack-up requirements near the PMIC – an area that is often a challenge to design. In addition, the transient currents and voltages of the additional phases are contained to the external power sources' immediate areas, helping to minimize EMI and avoid inductive interference."
"An innovative control system leverages a proprietary two-wire interface without sensitive analog feedback traces or individual pulse width modulation (PWM) line connections. This minimizes the number of PCB traces and avoids potential signal coupling issues, allowing the customer to easily scale the number of add-on power sources required for each application. Furthermore, automatic signal integrity calibration practically eliminates proximity and trace length concerns, allowing customers to separate the host PMIC and power sources as needed to optimize the system."
Availability: Now in samples to qualified customers only


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Flint City Councilman Caught Driving Drunk w/ Four Flat Tires On the Wrong Side of I-475 w/ Weed On Him
Earlier this month, we pointed out that there were some city councilmen (and women) elected with very interesting backgrounds -- most notably, the two convicted felons now on board. This morning, one of them proved why you don't elect a felon to city council. Find out which one and get all the ridiculous details here.
Flint made national news earlier this month, unfortunately it was the same type of negative stuff that always gets us in headlines outside of "The Mitten." Two men with criminal backgrounds (one of whom was a convicted murderer) had somehow slipped by voters and were elected to city council. Even the pros over at MLive, who actually published an article for each ward called "Everything you need to know about the ___ ward city council race," somehow missed that info. They later apologized for the epic news fail.
First Ward Councilman Eric Mays, who was previously convicted of felonious assault in 1987, was quickest to prove to Flint voters that they made the wrong call, as he was arrested this morning (November 30th) for a number of reasons.
According to NBC 25, police received a call about a vehicle driving in the wrong direction on southbound I-475 at around 2:50a. Following up on the call, Flint Police found Mays attempting to change four flat tires on Carpenter Rd near 475, where Genesee Township Police were already on the scene. Shortly after, he was arrested for operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol and possession of Marijuana. He also refused to be fingerprinted and did not have proof of insurance.
Mays is likely just about to be released after sleeping it off in Flint City Lockup. We'll update the story when more details are available. I said it before and I'll say it again -- Flint will never be able to bounce back if we keep electing clowns like this.


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Thousands Protest Against Government in Ecuador
Protesters rail against economic, labor and social policies
Thousands of people took to the streets in Quito and at least 12 other cities in Ecuador Thursday to protest against the government of President Rafael Correa, asking for changes in economic, labor and social policies.
. . .
Protest leaders said they are protesting against planned labor and land reforms, to reject large-scale mining and new oil tenders, and against planned constitutional reforms that will open up the possibility for indefinite re-election for elected posts. Leaders also said they are against new tariffs for 38% of the imported products. Economists said the tariff increase would cause a general increase in prices, affecting mainly the middle class.
Protesters marched about two kilometers in central Quito, carrying signs that read, "We want democracy" and "No more tax and tariff increases" as well as "Say no to re-election."
As you may recall, last year Rafael Correa was pondering whether to continue as president after 2017, even when the constitution prevents it.
Last year he also came up with a fake currency to cover up a fiscal deficit, including debt service, of some $9.2 billion. This year he asked China for help.