A Very Merry Open Source Wedding
Ah, weddings. Love is in the air with flowers, family and friends and a beautiful cake with miniature bride and groom figurines adorning the top. It’s a picturesque and peaceful scene.
On the other hand, Keith Loo, Open Source Lead at Microsoft Canada, and his now-wife Mila had different ideas for their wedding. Instead of the usual vows, they decided to change things up a little bit and added a Microsoft and open source twist to their special day.
Keith talks more about his action-packed wedding as well as his time at Microsoft maintaining Make Web Not War and more.
When you started at Microsoft, were you always doing open source?
Yes — I was always known as the open source guy in my area. But one day, Microsoft reached out to me and asked if I’d like to work on open source for them. That was kind of surprising to me — this was about five years ago. I didn’t know that Microsoft even did open source then. If anything, I had always assumed that Microsoft was anti-open source. I never really wanted to work there before because I was an open source guy. But I was supremely impressed by the people and by the passion they had for open source. In open source communities, we respect the people that really contribute to open source, and I realized that the people I respected so much were Microsoft employees. And that’s when I realized that maybe I should give Microsoft a try.
On that note, you decided to incorporate a lot of Microsoft references in your wedding. What inspired this?
I think [the references] go toward my history with Microsoft. I’ve always been known as the open source guy and, if anything, the anti-Microsoft guy. But now — on the most important day of my life — I really wanted Microsoft to be a part of it, since it’s made a pretty big difference in my life. We threw in Xbox (Halo), Windows (Cortana), Make Web Not War (Azure and Open Source). We had a bit of everything. Even on our wedding day, we did something at Microsoft that’s never been done before — we shot our wedding in the Microsoft Technology Center. One of the security officers there said that in the twelve years that they’ve worked there, they’ve never seen something like this. But we took some really, really cool action shots.
How did the idea for this video come about?
Mila and I are — we like to use the term — eclectic. She’s a stunt actress and fights in movies for a living, and therefore she loves action. She’s a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo and she’s all about fitness, health and fighting. Whereas me, I’m the opposite. I’m a geek. We’re different in that way, so our wedding was a combination of both of us. We did things that we thought represented us. So that was reflected in our wedding video — we wanted something that was really us. We figured if our wedding video was an action movie based on video games, that would represent us.
The story behind the idea is that we’ve always told every single person a different story about how we’ve met, which is true. We’ve never told anyone how we’ve really met. Even our closest friends and family don’t know how we met. So it’s kind of funny. And so the night of our wedding one of my closest friends asked everyone if they wanted to know how we met. This video was our latest rendition of that.
How long did it take to get everything together?
It took a lot longer than it seems. I would say there were weeks of practice, but we were fortunate that all four stunt actors are actual actors. The choreography was probably two weeks straight of practicing six to eight hours a day. The shoot itself was a 22-hour shoot. It was like filming a short film, and we were very fortunate to work with a producer, director and crew who actually make top flight TV shows, movies and commercials. And of course there was a lot of paperwork because we are technically using a lot of Microsoft copyrighted products. This process did take a while, but I learned during the process that Microsoft is generally cool with their Halo fan base because they want to encourage the gaming community to have a great time.
How did people react to the video and the whole production?
If you’re a gamer — there were a lot of gamers and Microsofties at our wedding — then they obviously got all of the references. I think everyone can appreciate when Mila’s kicking butt on screen. That’s pretty cool. It was really well-received and it was great to see something we made that our friends and family could laugh at and have a good time with.
Any final thoughts?
I’m truly grateful that all the people and teams at Microsoft were so supportive of our special day. From Xbox, Halo, Azure, Open Source, the MTC, Marketing, PR, HR, and the security teams — our wedding would not have been so awesome and truly ours without their support, and further cements myself as an OSS guy who truly loves Microsoft.
You can wish Keith and Mila congratulations on Twitter @thekeithloo and also learn more about Microsoft Canada’s open source community via Make Web Not War.
