I’m happy to announce that the Vick family has grown by two whole people! On January 9th, my wife Andrea’s birthday, we were in Guatemala City, Guatemala and became the proud parents of two boys, Benjamín Conley Vick and Samuel Jorge Vick.

Here’s Ben with some wild hair going on:

And here’s Sam:

After many months of paperwork and bureaucratic hell on all sides, we flew down to Guatemala last Monday and they dropped off the boys on Tuesday. After finalizing their visas with the US Embassy, we returned home last Sunday in a trip that was truly a marathon. However, the kids were pretty good about it and slept most of the way (except for maybe the last couple of hours). The true highlight, though, was trying to adjust our car seats (which had been left in Seattle) to our children’s dimensions in baggage claim at SeaTac airport at 1am. The temptation to pull a Britney Spears was mighty strong, but the icy roads outside suggested that it would have been unwise.

Otherwise, we’re just recovering from the trip and trying to start settling in to a regular schedule. At eight months, the boys are pretty good sleepers, but there are always kinks to work out in the system…

As I wrote back in August, my wife and I are adopting twin boys from Guatemala. At the time I last wrote, the adoption papers for Ben & Sam were wending their way through the Guatemalan legal system. The Guatemalan side of things was finalized back in October (making us officially their parents) and then there was just the small matter of getting the US Embassy in Guatemala to approve our papers so we could get visas to bring them back into the country. Well… It ended up taking a little longer than expected (two months instead of two weeks), but we got the word last week that our papers had been approved, so we’re now headed down to Guatemala! Assuming no other hiccups come along (knock wood), we should be back home next week with Ben and Sam, and I’m sure our house will never be the same again…

I’ll post pictures when we get back, but this also means that I’m going to be on paternity leave for a month as well, helping to get things settled (at least, as settled as they’ll ever get) around the house. I’m sure there’ll be some times I’m up at 4am and have nothing better to do than post, but things will likely be quiet on the VB front during that time. But rest assured I’ll be back!

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been ten whole years since I joined the Visual Basic team. Back in January of 1997 I moved from Access over to OLE Automation with the thought that automation was going to be the central place to be for development tools at Microsoft. A month or two after I’d made the switch, I had a meeting with some random guy named Brian Harry and some other people talking about this great metadata engine they were working on that was going to totally replace OLE Automation. I remember thinking, “yeah, right.” Of course, that metadata engine went on to become the metadata engine for the CLR…

After a year and a half working on OLE Automation (and, I hope, working on the first and last component I’ll ever have to check directly into Windows), I moved over to the Visual Basic compiler team. To say I had no idea what I was getting into was an understatement. We’d just shipped VB 6.0 and were figuring out what to do next…

The last ten years have been a real learning experience. Sure, I did well in my compiler class in college, but let’s face it–I had only scratched the surface of what it means to build a compiler, and I knew absolutely zip about language design (they just don’t teach you that in college). I’ve been blessed by the opportunity to work with a whole lot of really bright people who were patient enough to teach me what I needed to know along the way and to put up with me the times I got things wrong. I’m proud of the products that I’ve contributed to over the years, and am looking forward to the work that’s left to be done. The great thing about working on development tools is that there’s always something new…

Dunno if I’ll still be doing VB ten years from now, but as Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?”