Todd Gardner joins me to discuss web certificates, their expiry and CertKit.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What a certificate is, updating one, out of date certs, outages. No certificate. Move to full https. Certificate transparency logs, public; wildcard certificates. RSA key compromised - can decrypt old traffic; perfect forward secrecy - may be able to decrypt a single session. Certificate authority, how they work with browsers; the price of certificates; free certificates from Let's Encrypt. Certificate lifetime reduction. Bygone SSL problem, domain ownership vs certificate ownership, man in the middle. Browsers forced certificate lifetime change; automation required. Who is impacted.

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@toddhgardner.com
CertKit
Search Certificate Transparency Logs
The 47-Day Certificate Ultimatum: How Browsers Broke the CA Cartel

Mads Torgersen, the lead designer of C#, joins me to discuss what's new in C# 14.

Details

Who he is, what he does. His PhD. High and low level work. The language and the compiler. How the compiler enforces the language. Extension members - methods, properties, static, operators. Field backed properties. Going for a preview feature to full release; one feature that didn't make it. Null conditional assignment. Partial constructors; cognitive load of the language; optimized for heavy use and the professional developer; simple code vs simple language; the baggage of a C#. User defined compound assignment. Type unions - this year there is a design. dotnet run app.cs, language changes. Reducing boilerplate over the years.

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What's new in C# 14
C# Language Design Meetings
Other episodes with Mads

Ted Neward tells me about his job search that started in 2022. Part 2 of a 2 parter.

Details

Cover letters. The interviews, "elite code" - nothing to do with real programming jobs. Selling elite tests and tutorials, memorizing code. Showing that you can code, live coding. Ageism; cost of developers. Emotional aspects of the job search; much is out of your control; it can be devastating; accept help. Leverage the network, keep busy, keep the faith. How to find Ted.

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@tedneward.bsky.social
Ted's home page
Ted's blog post
Ted's LinkedIn

Ted Neward tells me about his job search that started in 2022. Part 1 of a 2 parter.

Details

Who he is, what he did. The job search begins. Companies are looking for "passionate" employees with specific skill sets. The job market in 2022. The COVID tech bubble. How he searched; false starts, near misses. Writing a book on the side. You need luck too. Customized resumes for roles. Applicant tracking systems.

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@tedneward.bsky.social
Ted's blog post

Jeff Fritz and I talk about glories of running .NET on Linux.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Where .NET runs. When it moved from Windows only. Arrival of .Net Core, open source. What changed in Microsoft for a move to multi-platform. .Net standard. Why try .NET on Linux. Flavors of Linux. .NET on Linux in Docker on the cloud. Types of Linux where .NET runs. CPUs. Ways to install .NET. Multiple versions of .NET can be installed. Ahead of time compilation. All the other tools you need, IDEs, Docker, databases including SQL Server. Publishing .NET as a container. .NET Aspire. Database IDEs. Maui. How to get started with .NET and Linux, Codespaces, live disks, WSL.

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@csharpfritz.com
Jeff's home page
Bryan's blog post on .NET on Linux
Building a container image with a Dockerfile

Tanya Janca talks about her new book and how to write secure code.

Details

Tanya's new book, why she is writing for the developer. Including code for multiple languages. What makes her book different. Starting with how to defend against vulnerabilities. Validation and sanitization. What zero trust is. Balancing too much security vs other needs. Supply chain attacks and accidents. Backing up and losing code. Excess security and workarounds. Sharing information about security breaches, making it ok to fail. Re-running security tests when code changes, using analysis tools. Testing legacy applications with compromised libraries, network segmentation, web application firewall. Where to get the book.

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Tanya's home page
Tanya's books
Other security podcasts

Mads Torgersen talks about what's new in C# 13, and some of what might be coming in C# 14.

Details

Upcoming release of C# 13, .NET Conf 2024. Params collections, use cases. Overload resolution priority. System.Threading.Lock, why a new lock type. Ref struct types, the underbelly of C#. Update on discriminated unions, but years away. Preview features - field keyword properties, extension everything.

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What's new in C# 13
C# Language Design - GitHub

Andy Gocke, lead of the native AOT and app model team at Microsoft answers listener's questions about native AOT.

Details

Future of Native AOT. Trimming support in third party libraries. Why .NET prefers its own JIT compiler over the LLVM MSIL backend. How much bigger with AOT be over MSIL and JIT. Where to follow libraries supporting AOT. Using AOT and GPUs. WASM performance. Can Native AOT replace Mono AOT. Plan for using dependency injection with AOT. When will the IDEs support for Native AOT. How to get in touch.

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@andygocke
Native AOT deployment
Native AOT on GitHub
Other C# Podcast Episodes

Stormy Peters talks about open source software and how to support the communities that create it.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What open source software is, what free means. Different types of OSS licenses, beerware, restrictive licenses. Commercial use of open software. Making OSS financially viable; tools that GitHub offers, most software is built on open source software. "We're not paying for free software!", normalizing paying for OSS; hard for companies to make payments; GitHub sponsors for companies. Individuals sponsoring/supporting OSS, getting in touch with maintainers. Barriers to getting involved. One-person projects. Sponsorship by programming language. Is anyone making enough money from sponsorship. How GitHub supports OSS developers; corporate sponsors. Copilot and its use of OSS. Future of OSS. How to get involved in OSS.

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@storming
Stormy's Wiki page
Stormy's web site
GitHub corporate sponsorship

Andy Gocke, lead of the native AOT and app model team at Microsoft talks about ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) in .NET.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Quick overview of ahead-of-time compilation (AOT); finding your code. Traditional compilation, interpreter vs compiler, translation from source to target languages. Operating systems, intermediate language (IL). There's always an interpreter. Just-in-time compilation (JIT); Java ran on multiple OSes, but .NET was Windows only; .NET ran on multiple architectures. Ready-to-run (R2R) and trimming. Tiered compilation, variable performance. R2R mixes precompiled and IL, native AOT only has precompiled. Trimming - getting rid of unneeded things, trouble with plugins and reflection; static analysis - don't ignore warnings. Why AOT was built, where it is a good fit. How much work it was; Core RT, low adoption, but good feedback. Good and bad use cases for AOT. For .NET 7 console apps and libraries, or if you don't get trim warnings; a single trim warning is too many. AOT and non-AOT OSS NuGet packages. .NET 8 support for ASP.NET. JIT and IL will not go away. AWS Lambda functions and AOT, exclusions, problems that might occur; trimmable all the way down. Getting started with AOT. Can't turn off trimming. Future of AOT.

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@andygocke
Native AOT deployment
Andy's de/serializer Serde-dn
More C# episodes

Tanya Janca talks about fixing your developer process so that security is part of the life cycle.

Details

Who she is, what she does. Becoming a penetration tester. Being a developer advocated. Adding security at the end of the software development life cycle; people wish there was a silver bullet for security. "We're secure, we don't need to test our security". Security should start at the project kickoff. Who owns security, the devs or the security team; getting authority and responsibility. Choosing what to fix; likelihood, potential losses, cost. Security stories during development iterations. Security gets in the way. Feature switches to turn off security in dev environments. Negotiating about what to fix; working around the process. Should security programming be a specialty. Don't build a tool if you can buy it. Copy pasting your way into trouble; Stack Overflow has a security section now; team to build core security tools. Buying services for authentication/authorization. Communicating with other applications. Why no HTTPS. Why encryption at rest when data is in the cloud. Security testing - static analysis, dependencies vulnerabilities, dynamic analysis. Security tools.

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@SheHacksPurple
SheHacksPurple
Tanya's music
We Hack Purple
Why No HTTPS
Other Security Podcast Episodes

Mads Torgersen answers questions from listeners about C# 11.

Details

What features he regrets most; inclusion of discriminated unions; progress on roles and extensions; .NET LTS, STS, and C#; null handling and null references; warnings as errors; pressure to add more functional stuff; functions as first-class citizens; Mads is mad about delegate types - "delegate types should never have existed!"; meetings with Anders Hejlsberg; adding cloud programming constructs; reminiscing about async; evolutionary ideas; comparisons to Kotlin and Rust; balancing needs of developers with different levels of experience (Jon Skeet); managing the C# language design meetings (Jared Parsons).

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@MadsTorgersen
What's new in C# 11
Other interviews with Mads

Mads Torgersen, lead designer of C# at Microsoft, talks to me about the recent release of C# 11.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Features released throughout the year; what happened to parameter null checking; language decision is forever, final decision rests with Mads. C# will keep evolving, adding new features but keeping the language familiar; maintaining backward compatibility. .NET Framework does not hinder C#'s evolution. Generic math library. List patterns. Raw string literals and working with JSON; community contributions. Required members.

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@MadsTorgersen
What's new in C# 11
Generic Math
List Patterns
Other interviews with Mads

Clark Sell talks about building a community for software developers.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What a community is; not limited to in-person. How to build a community; need for some organizing force. Building a community via a conference. Local conference. Financial side of a conference, price of ticket, speaker stipend. Getting the conference started, polyglot, website, event planning. Getting people to attend the first conference. Format/behaviors, events to bring people together. The challenge of polyglot conferences; tech sessions vs soft skills; the non tech ones are more likely to change your life; software is about people. Getting the most of a conference; reach out a talk to attendees/presenters; don't put presenters on a pedestal. Way to get involved in the community; have more than one community.

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@csell5

That Conference

That Conference on Twitter

Other episodes about conferences

Michael Dowden tells me about his experiences building and managing remote teams.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Managing a remote team, first employees hired over social media; skipped formal interviews some times; impact of Covid on team, meetings instead of email, stress. Not "work from home"; types of remote work, being available, meeting occasionally; how the team handled remote work; improving communication, document outcomes/decisions, documentation is the "source of truth", message overload; employees dedicated to managing communication; handling difficult conversations, don't let it linger; handling HR/legal issues across country/world; agile and remote work, Live Share; tips for remote work,

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@mrdowden
Andromeda Galactic Solutions
Other episodes with Michael
Managing Distributed Teams
Thriving in Chaos
Winning as the Home Team

Mads Torgersen and I chat about his recent diagnosis with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and how it has changed his life for the better.

Details

Why we are making this podcast. The diagnosis; his symptoms. Hard time focusing + stress and fear, low self esteem, fear of what others think; good emotional intelligence. Biological disorder. Diagnostic process. Looking back at his childhood through the lens of ADHD, new perspective on old events, better understanding of paths/decisions. Conscious forgetfulness. Baking bread, (fast and) slow; long process, sticking to the recipe helps. Other superpowers. Handling stress, mutually beneficial delegation. Effect on relationships, people pleaser, allowing people to walk over him. Imposter syndrome, not belonging to the group, too busy being distracted. Hard to know what's going on with a person from the outside, extra effort to do things that require attention, biking uphill all the time. The Mads wiggle/explanation dance, the brain/body needs activity; staying still in schools. Treatment, changing habits, learning about AD/HD; stimulant medication, biking on flat ground, better focus, less anxiety, no side effects; needs to consciously take breaks; ADHD in the morning and taking the pill. Nonmedical routes, meditation, relaxing, diet. Talking publicly, sharing with others. Genetics and looking back on family history; understanding the past. Getting a diagnosis can help you get a good life; some resources (links below). What's next for Mads. Be open to people's differences.

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@MadsTorgersen
Addressing Controversy in ADHD: An Interview with Russell A. Barkley, PhD | Technology Networks
Jessica McCabe's YouTube channel - How to ADHD
Dani Donovan - posters and cartoons on ADHD
The Ologies podcast has a fantastic double episode on ADHD
Russell A. Barkley books
Edward Hallowell books
Check your library for electronic versions of these books

Jared Parsons, C# compiler lead at Microsoft continues talking about the C# compiler.

Details

Many ways of doing the same thing, evolving language, succinct code. Null parameter checking, listening customer feedback; preview features. String literals, JSON interpolation. Backward compatibility hindering the language; better ways of releasing .NET and C#; breaking compatibility; adding Records. No tiny changes to overload resolution. What it would take to make major break in compatibility; removing old APIs while maintaining binary compatibility. Yearly cadence; much better for features and bugs but not everything can be done in a year. The move to open source - better processes, better docs, community PRs, more time reviewing code; dealing with abuse; more direct contact with customers.

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@jaredpar
Jared's blog
More C# podcast episodes
Working with JSON in .NET, a better way? (Bryan's blog post)

Jared Parsons, C# compiler lead at Microsoft talks about the C# compiler.

Details

Who he is, what he does. The compiler team, team size, unlimited resources might not be better. Other roles he performs. What the compiler is, what it does. Impact of the operating system on compiler. Runtime teams. Implementing C# language features. How much work is involved in implementing a feature; review process; a language is more than the compiler. An example of a "small change" - structs with parameterless constructors. Influence of the compiler team on the language design. Where does C# end and .NET begin. Global using and top-level statements. What dotnet build is; ready to run and trimming.

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@jaredpar
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Martine Dowden explains what accessibility is, and how to make your sites and apps more accessible.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What accessibility is. Following standards; screen readers; captions; alt text. Why I should make a site more accessible, being a good human. Accessible sites are better for everyone. Getting buy-in from managers, teammates. Laws around accessibility. How to get started; automated testing - Lighthouse, Accessibility Insights; manual testing still needed. Common problems and fixes. Get feedback from users. Ads and accessibility. Changes that are too difficult to make. No difference with single page applications. Lack of tools to help with problems, be wary of copy/pasting code; CLI tools, linters. Finding more info, Martine's book.

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@Martine_Dowden
Martine's Homepage
Andromeda Galactic Solutions
Approachable Accessibility: Planning for Success (book)
#147 Martine and Michael Dowden, Teaching Children to Program
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Accessibility Insights
Andromeda Galactic Solutions
Lighthouse

Kate Ball talks about burnout - what it is, how to spot it, and how to deal with it.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What burnout is; how it is different from normal stress. Who is susceptible, affect of age. Causes. How to recognize burnout in yourself. What to do about it; advocating for yourself, exercise, diet, sleep, asking for help. Recognizing burnout in others. Self-regulation, helping yourself. Talking to a manager; making a change.

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Kate's LinkedIn
National Alliance on Mental Illness
National Institute of Mental Health
HelpGuide
Psycom
Anxiety & Depression Association of America

Brandon Minnick of Microsoft talks about the upcoming release of .NET MAUI.

Details

Who he is, what he does, travelling. GitTrends. Overview of MAUI - Multi-platform App UI. Existing UI options; some details on Blazor, web on the desktop. A deeper dive on MAUI; layers, modules, platforms, cross platform. Migrating to MAUI; waiting on libraries. How to get started with MAUI, Visual Studio 2022 preview. When it is coming. Community Toolkit; promoting feature back into MAUI. How to get in touch with Brandon.

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@TheCodeTraveler
Brandon's dev blog on Microsoft
What is .NET MAUI?
.NET MAUI Community Toolkit
Brandon's podcast
GitTrends
Our other podcasts

Mark Eisenberg talks about the move to DevOps in large enterprises, the challenges they face, and the lessons they can learn from other companies.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What an enterprise is, examples; pets vs cattle. A definition of DevOps; collaboration and automation; build process to be automatable vs automating a human process. Why companies are moving to DevOps; better, faster, cheaper; wanting to change the outcome without changing the process or people. More on collaboration and building differently, don't have a separate DevOps team or site reliability engineering team. Politics of moving to DevOps; ops team don't always want devs working on the system; devs vs DBAs. Cultural change should be an outcome, not a driver, the "DevOps industrial complex". Importance of unit testing. Shift left; dev sec ops; observability and traceability. Some final thoughts and reading recommendations.

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@CloudBizAndTech
Mark's LinkedIn

Mads Torgersen answers questions from listeners about the upcoming release of C# 10.

Details

Deprecated features. Extension everything, some background, some possible features, starting over, an extension interface. Roles and shapes, maybe preview in C# 11, maybe release in C# 12 - "the edge of programming languages". Is the work in the design or the implementation of a feature; keeping the spirit of the language, harmony, and philosophy. Hot reload and impact on language. Performance improvements. C# and Linux; .NET is a cross-platform framework, not tied to Windows, Bryan has written a lot of .NET that runs on Linux, even MS SQL apps. Mads is not making C# into F#.

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@madstorgersen
Mads' blog
What's new in C# 10.0
GitHub dotnet/csharplang
Bryan's blog posts on running .NET in Linux containers

Mads Torgersen talks to me about the upcoming release of C# 10.

Details

Who he is, what he does. The design team. Danes and language design. Aims for C# 10; yearly cadence; simplification, removing boiler plate; minimal API, fuller lambda expression. Relationship with .NET team. Users driving changes. Picking the changes to make; championing a change request. Versioning, guidelines vs rules. New features Mads likes, global using, struct records, with expressions. Moving from C# 9 to 10, suggestions and fixes in Visual Studio, what about VS Code. Is .NET 6 a Framework? Naming challenges. Many ways to do the same thing in C#. ''Modern C#'' - a sliding window of how to use the current C#. Newer features improve the code, not just the semantics. A new math feature that Mads is excited about; static abstract members on interfaces. What didn't make it into C# 10. The compiler team building the language.

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@madstorgersen
Mads' blog
What's new in C# 10.0
Preview Features in .NET 6 – Generic Math

Mark Seemann on how to improve your software skills, and it's not all about programming.

Details

Who he is, what he does. The title of his book. Software - engineering/art/craft/science. Writing code that other people can understand is the hard challenge. Software is not engineering, yet. How to improve your own way of working. Keeping complexity low, seven plus/minus two, the emulator in the brain; easier to understand less complex code. Test driven development and why it helps. Using checklists makes you better with no other effort. Encapsulation - can an object be treated as a black box and not need to understand its internal state; trusting an object to behave in a predictable way. Complexity and software architecture; fractal architecture; sticking to seven things. Eureka moments don't happen at the keyboard; timeboxing; flow state, in the zone; leave the room. LaTeX, why???

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@ploeh
Mark's blog
Code That Fits in Your Head

David Guida and I discuss event sourcing, what it is, its uses and drawbacks, and how to get started.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Overview of event sourcing, everything is an event, aggregates and domain driven design. A practical example; multiple subscribers; the query model and storing calculated data. Why not use a database. Correcting an error in a historical event. Using the stream on a new application. Scenarios where event sourcing applies. Technologies to use, Event Store, Marten, Apache Kafka, CosmosDb. Using Azure. Versioning data, and changing shapes of data. Libraries to make this easier. Future of event sourcing. How to get started. How to find David.

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@DavideGuida82
David's Homepage

Martin Beeby and I continue our discussion on AWS and .NET, turning to security, IaC, and, how to get started with AWS.

Details

Security feels different and is different; IAM, roles and permissions. Documentation. Tooling for .NET developers, best withing Visual Studio, some for VS Code and Rider; Lambda templates and tests, local deploy with Docker, deploy to AWS. Serverless Application Model. Infrastructure as Code, Pulumi and Cloud Development Kit; advantages over yaml based IaC. Getting started with AWS, the free tier, leaving stuff on accidentally.

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@thebeebs
Martin's Homepage
AWS Developer Blog

Dr. Jamie Goldstein discusses how we are affected by Covid-19, and how to build your mental and emotional fitness.

Details

Who she is, what she does, what Coa offers. Impact of 2020/2021 on mental health, "Pulling back the curtain"; how Covid broke our community; "work from home" vs "work with home". Stress over a longer period affecting more people; advice on handling stress, building emotional fitness. A quick bit of advice to help now. How employers can help employees, wellness days, expecting less from employees, management should set an example, using vacation. Transitioning from work to home, adding a "commute" to your day, getting away from work. Handling loneliness, Coa community. Preparing for the next crisis, building your emotional fitness, getting comfortable with uncertainty. Seeing the positive. Finding out more about Coa.

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@joincoa
Coa

Martin Beeby talks about how AWS supports .NET on their cloud.

Details

Who he is, what he does, doing VB.NET, context switching between languages. AWS is for .NET developers; Microsoft going open source and cross platform dev. Moving from Microsoft to AWS. Visual Studio, VS Code, Rider, Docker. C# and .NET are first class citizens on AWS. Getting used to .NET on AWS; challenges with documentation for .NET on AWS. C# is a good option for lambda; choose the language that fits the need - image manipulation in Node was better, Python for audio; don't worry about performance too much. AWS has an overwhelming number of services. High availability MS-SQL RDS.

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@thebeebs
Martin's Homepage
AWS Developer Blog

Suparna Damany talks about the little changes we can make to stay physically healthy while working during Covid-19.

Details

Who she is. What she does. Impact of not going to office; less exercise, more hours worked. What employers should provide. Damage and repair is is happening every day; cumulative nature. Little bursts of exercise; intensity, making exercise part of the day."Fidget all day". Keeping a routine going over a long period; variety. Advice for parents; ergonomics; Suparna's first book; exercise for kids. Good ergonomics, move around, vary your movements, change devices, change hands, mice. Hand exercise devices. Her new book on chronic muscle pain, looking at the body holistically. How to find her, her app.

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Damany Health
Suparna's Book - It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!

Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi talks about modern Infrastructure as Software tools and approaches.

Details

Who he is, what he does, less coding more team building. History of IaC. Replace instead of repair; using more managed services. When did IaC start. Configuration orchestration vs configuration management; cloud infrastructure as code. What Pulumi is, modern IaC - moving to Infrastructure as Software. A more modern approach. Supported languages - TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, .NET; aiming for layer to share IaC across languages. Pulumi instead of point and click, clear picture of what is deployed, why use it, repeatability, testing, reliable process, Pulumi lets you follow good software dev practices for IaC. An example with Elasticsearch; inputs and outputs, building a graph of dependencies. The difficulties of working with Json in C#. Once you know how to use the IaC tool, knowing the platform becomes the problem; Pulumi aims to provide templates for larger units of infrastructure. Keeping the provider up to date with the third party platforms; Pulumi's own for Kubernetes and Azure. Future of Pulumi, software driven automation, automation API. Getting started with Pulumi.

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@lukehoban
Pulumi's Homepage
Bryan's article on Json
Bryan's example of working with Json and Pulumi

Todd Gardner, creator of TrackJS and RequestMetrics tells me how the web runs on JavaScript why it is so important.

Details

Who he is, what he does. JavaScript and ECMA Script, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, transpilers; Blazor, WebAssembly; SliverLight and Flash. JavaScript on IoT. JavaScript on the backend; Bryan rants about using Json with C#. Parsing Json and the importance of strings. Why you should learn JavaScript; which JavaScript should I learn - Node, React, Angular, etc. Bryan talks about learning JavaScript. What NodeJs is; module dependency version hell. The unclear state of asynchronous programming in JavaScript; Todd clears things up, callback hell, promises, async/await. JavaScript is not a fad. How to learn JavaScript. Monitoring your website with RequestMetrics; measuring real user performance, not synthetic monitoring; privacy concerns.

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@toddhgardner
Todd's Homepage
TrackJS
Request Metrics
The PluralSight Course on JavaScript that Bryan liked
Kyle Simpson - You Don't Know JS
You Don't Know JS - GitHub

Brandon Minnick of Microsoft talks about the process of publishing an app to the various app stores.

Details

Who he is, what he does. GitHub repo exploration; side loading an app; compiling the code to build the binaries, hosting the binaries instead. The app store rule book and reviews. App Centre Test and testing you app. Fun with manual testing of apps, GitHub access, two factor auth, finally accepted. Using App Center Test. Things that happen to apps in the wild; crash reporting. Tools to help with getting certified on the app stores. How to get in touch with Brandon. How to find the GitTrends app. How to get in touch with Brandon.

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@TheCodeTraveler
Brandon's site
GitTrends on GitHub
GitTrends on Google Play Store
GitTrends on Apply App Store

Martine and Michael Dowden talk about the importance of teaching children to program and how to get started.

Details

Who they are, what they do. The benefits of programming, when to start, Robot Turtles, Scratch and Scratch Junior, moving to a traditional programming language. Helping the child move to the next step, keep their interests in mind; have a project in mind. Minecraft Mods, Boxels, Advent of Code, Hour of Code, Kano, Microbit. Books. Teaching their own children. What if no one in the household is a programmer - Hour of Code, Code Academy, board games, Human Resources Machine (phone game). Learning software on a phone or tablet, CodePen, using a Bluetooth keyboard with a phone or tablet. How to get/keep children interested; inspiring children, especially girls. Explaining what programming makes possible. Start with something they know, not a black screen. How to find Michael and Martine, downloading their book.

Full show notes and all links

Dr. Mads Torgersen, lead designer of C# at Microsoft answers listener questions.

Details

How ideas for C# become features, other languages, user requests, user problems. Taking over from Anders Hejlsberg, a quiet change. Move to open source, championing new features. UI plans for C#. Extensions everything and shapes, keeping up with other languages. Who develops C#. How Mads stays so good looking. How to try C# 9.

Full show notes

Dr. Mads Torgersen, lead designer of C# at Microsoft, talks to me about the upcoming release of C# 9.

Details

Who he is, what he does, working on C# full time, who he works with. The design process. Doctor Mads, PhD. Init only properties. Records, immutability and a rabbit hole. Top level programs - simpler main programs; making programs simpler. The legacy changes or not making changes .NET. Breaking changes; an example.

Full show notes

Bill Wagner of Microsoft talks about the goal of one .NET.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What .NET 5 is, what is happening .NET Framework. How .NET 5 relates to .NET Core. Migrating to .NET 5. Performance improvements. What happens to Entity Framework. Framework to .NET 5 - reasons to stay, reasons to move; Windows specific features. What happens to .NET Standard. What happens to Xamarin. Long term service schedule. Release at .Net Conf. New features. A little about C# 9; what's new in C# 9, immutable objects. Release cycles. Attracting younger people to .NET. System.Devices, System.Maui. UWP support. Support for F# and Visual Basic

Full show notes

Dylan Beattie talks about the present and future of tech conferences, how organizers, presenters and attendees are adapting.

Details

Who he is, what he does, and what he is doing during the recording! Conferences that are going on now. Participating as an attendee, dedicating time, trying to work; more available to people who can't travel. Participating as a speaker, some of the incentives are gone, revenue share; lack of hallway track. How conferences are engaging with people, talks and breaks, Slack, multiple tracks. What Dylan is doing with NDC. Time zone vs geographical partitioning of conferences. NDC will continue to make recordings available for free. Canceling a conference is a lot of work. Conference sponsorship. Microsoft made a success of Bulid. Will conferences go back to normal at some point, distributed conferences. Climate change and conferences. Working and isolation; corporate offices are not the future but places to work in your neighborhood might be.

Full show notes

Aaron Stannard talks about the challenges facing the open source software world and how he thinks they can be addressed.

Details

Who he is, what he does, a little about Akka and the actor model. Aaron’s blogs on open source projects, burnout; Microsoft vs other software ecosystems; sustainable open source, being a victim of your own success, bug reports, feature requests, the aggression. What is the incentive to work on open source, making a little money from open source, sustainability and incentives. “No way are we paying for free software!”. Aggression and abuse. Optimism about OSS, examples of successful OSS ventures. How to find more from Aaron.

Full show notes

Abraham Asfaw of IBM talks about the current state of their quantum computing project, and how it has moved out of the lab and into industry and education.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Quick overview of quantum computing and Qiskit. Book on quantum computing for undergraduates. State of quantum in industry, optimization problems, quantum advantage. Industrial examples, financial, chemistry. Demand for developers. Current quantum volume – doubling every year. Why a million qubits by themselves would not be enough. The meaning of quantum advantage/supremacy. Combing classical and quantum computing. How many quantum computers IBM has. Where to get the free IBM book. Other useful resources.

Full show notes

Maria Naggaga talks about Try .NET and .NET Interactive - new ways of learning and demonstrating .NET code, and running samples.

Details

Who she is, what she does. Presenting at conferences. What try dot net is, why they built it; language support. What it lookds like, how to use it. Complexity of what it can run. A small $30,000 bill. Compare to repl. More complex usage; Bryan's Try Dot Net example of Polly. Hosting examples on the web. Blazor and Try Dot Net. How to run it locally. Future of Try Dot Net, changing name to Dot Net Interactive; Dot Net Juypter and Notebooks. Try Dot Net js. Coming features.

Full show notes

Heather Newman talks about company culture, why it is so important and how you can help improve it.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What culture means, elements of a good culture, transparency and trust; trust and mistakes. Heather's talk at MS ignite. How to find out about the culture from the outside, a bad reputation spreads. The interview and making the company appealing. Why culture is so important. Culture and strategy. Diversity, inclusion and culture; why it's important in tech. Seeing a bad culture when you're in the middle of it - "are you happy?". How to find Heather.

Full show notes

Jeff Haynie of Pinpoint talks about their survey and report on how engineering teams measure their performance.

Details

Who he is, what he does, a little about Appcelerator Titanium. What is Pinpoint, finding out what is going in engineering. Report on state of engineering performance management, companies surveyed, metrics used. Software is a new profession, much will change in the medium term. Metrics used by companies who did measure; why cost wasn't a metric; is there a "best" metric. How Pinpoint measures their own performance. How is the data gathered. Black boxes in the company and getting visibility into teams, how does agile fit in. How the rest of the business views engineering; CTO/CIO are more most negative about engineering. Challenges teams face; no metrics no problems. Future work. Finding the report.

Full show notes

This is a re-release of a podcast I made with the late K. Scott Allen in 2015.

Details

Who he is; is ASP.NET 5 a rewrite; lightweight, better for SPAs; Scott's favorite new features ; don't need vs 2015, works on Linux; more modular; cross platform, core (subset) CLR; lighter on resources; inbuilt dependency injection; new configuration system; middleware, its history and how it differs from handlers and filter, middleware sees more; combining MVC and Web API; tag helpers; web forms are gone; is Microsoft providing better documentation and examples; front-end improvements, angular, bootstrap, Grunt, Gulp, Bower.

Dennie Declercq talks about autism, becoming a developer and his views on how to work with others with autism.

Details

Who he is, what he does, volunteer work. Dennie's view on autism, learning to program. Working, keeping the mind busy, crashing. Joining a coaching program. The challenges Dennie faces at work, getting stuck in a thought, eye contact, deadlines, asking for help. Planning his day. seeing the talents of a person. Where you can see Dennie give talks.

Full show notes

Bob Martin talks about his new book, the origins of agile, its current state and his hopes for its future.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Frustration and writing his new book - Clean Agile. What agile is, small idea for small teams to execute small projects. "fuss and muss" and the origins of agile; small steps - code, tests and Mercury capsule; bloat and unnecessary processes. Impact of universities on the software field. Agile meeting in Snowbird. Project success and failure, with and without agile, “agile is a feedback mechanism...it tries to get the bad news out as early as possible”. What happened to “agile is as small idea”; agile as part of a job title. How agile should affect programming, small feedback loops; ceremonies; agile provides lots of data, micro-management. Bryan’s story about chefs and agile, “Agile is the way programmers were seen to behave in the wild”. The business and agile, deadlines. No promises, no commitment. Why agile hasn’t changed or been replaced over the years. No scientific studies of agile or programming. Agile certification. Agile has simple riles but is difficult to master. Bob’s hopes for the future of agile. Why he is “Uncle Bob”.

Full show notes

Brandon Minnick of Microsoft continues with his list of common mistakes in async/await programming and his suggestions.

Details

Don't return awaits (sometimes), ConfigureAwait(false), synchronization context, what about API applications with no UI, and .NET Core is different too. Do I need async if I my threadpool never runs out of threads, consider scaling in the future. New in .NET Core 3, ValueTask (if method has an await but might not use it), heaps and stacks, how to find Brandon.

Full show notes

Brandon Minnick of Microsoft talks about common mistakes when using async/await, and offers solutions.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What asynchronous programming is, calling code that will return an answer in the future; multithreading. How to make a synchronous method asynchronous, freeing the calling thread; what the compiler does with async code - awaits, switch statements, move next and try catch. Calling async from sync, don't use .Result() it's a blocking call, .Result() throws an aggregate exception; use .GetAwaiter().GetResult().

Full show notes

Lars Klint talks about the cloud first approach to software development.

Details

Who he is, what he does, why he is in Australia. What the cloud is, and how to get into it. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. What “cloud first” means; data sovereignty; cloud only. Serverless, “Serverless is PaaS on steroids”, cold starts in serverless, hot-tiers. All companies can use the cloud. Criteria for building in the cloud on the premises, Amazon Snowmobile, Microsoft coastal datacenters. Picking a cloud provider. Is multicloud worth doing. Getting started with the cloud, moving an application to the cloud. How to find Lars, upcoming conferences.

Full show notes

Dylan Beattie talks about his love of programming, esoteric languages and his language, Rockstar.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Dylan and Bryan had Amstrad computers. Programming as art, programming for the sake of programming, Conway's game of life, demo scene, squeezing more out of the hardware. Squeezing more out of software; code golf; obfuscating code. Quine - programs that print themselves, quine relays, record is 128 languages. Esoteric languages, a story about Alfred Hitchcock, Turing completeness, examples of esoteric languages. The origins of Rockstar; an example of FizzBuzz in Rockstar, making real music. Dylan’s hectic conference schedule.

Full show notes

Isaac Levin of Microsoft talks about Application Insights, how to use it and what you can learn from the data.

Details

Who he is, what what does. What Application Insights is, where it can be used, can be used with any language. Isaac's favorite feature. How to use it. Who uses it. Mobile and IoT use cases. Most common uses, web, desktop, etc. Relationship to diagnostic source. Getting data out, common use cases; snapshots for point in time debugging. Querying data data in near real time, charts and visualizations. Alternatives to App Insights. Future of App Insights and telemetry in general; time travel debugging. How to get in touch and tell Isaac how you are using it.

Laurie Barth tells me why she loves speaking at conferences and gives some advice on how you can become a speaker too.

Details

Who she is, what she does. Why she likes speaking at conferences, how she got started. Going from knowing about something to talking about. Telling a story. What makes a good talk, practice, engage with the audience. How to apply to a conference; the abstract. How to get started, small or large. Advice to new speakers. Tips for the day of the talk, Bryan has some tips too. Tips for existing speakers.

Full show notes

Patrick Smacchia of NDepend comes back on the podcast to talk about updates to the tool in the past two years.

Details

Who he is, what he does. A little bit of background on NDepend. Azure devops; NDepend in CICD, coming soon to Linux containers. Visual Studio extension, challenges in writing extensions in VS 2019, extension placement; no VS Code extension. How coming changes in .NET and Visual Studio will impact NDepend. Short and medium future for NDepend.

Full show notes

Michal Klos of Indigo explains how they use Snowflake to help grow food, improve agriculture and the protect environment.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Decommoditizing agriculture. What Snowflake is, it's in all the clouds. Difference between a data warehouse and a database; could Snowflake be used instead of a database. Michal’s first experience with Snowflake a few years ago; how he uses it now; where the data Indigo uses comes from. Copying the data to traditional dbs. Querying Snowflake. Example of how Indigo uses data from prototype to production. How big do you need to be to use Snowflake. How to get started; put an API in front of the warehouse. Tech stack at Indigo. They are hiring.

Full show notes

Elissa Shevinsky, author and founder of Faster Than Light, talks about static code analysis and why you should be doing it.

Details

Who she is, what she does. A little about Faster Than Light. What static analysis is; why it is important, availability by language. How to get started. Making it part of CI/CD. Uploading code to Faster Than Light, why their tool is faster then doing the analysis yourself. What common problems are found and what can be done about them. The future of the company; how to get in touch.

Full show notes

Angela Dugan talks about teams, what they are, how they go wrong and how to build a great one.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What a team is; should we all be full-stack developers. Types of team member, introverts and extroverts. Difference between leader and manager. Career path for developers who don't want to manage. Finding the strengths of a team member and a team. People are the biggest and hardest part of building software. How to build a strong team - try to find balance of skills, keep the team the same unless a change is needed, empower the team to make decision. Can the structure of agile interfere with team. One team member can run a team. Book recommendations from Angela. Where you can see Angela giving a talk.

Full show notes

Mads Torgersen talks about the upcoming release of C#, what's new, what's different, what else is coming in the future. He also answers questions from Twitter.

** Details **

Who he is, what he does. What new in C# 8; robustness, pits of success; nullable reference types. No breaking changes. Use of language features, IntelliCode. The legacy of String, unicode and UTF8, array, immutability and invariants. Async streams, what it is and history. Bryan's blog on steaming, why async is important, especially if you have a limited number of threads available. Improved patterns matching, recursive patterns. C# 8 relies on a .NET Core Runtime feature. C# 8 and Visual Studio schedules are independent; upcoming schedules for .NET Core and .NET 5. Questions from Twitter - records and roles, expression tree updates, compiler flags, AOT, tiered compilation, type providers, async/await inside LINQ expressions, discriminated unions, Typescript style inline union. Relationship between C# design team and the compiler team. Mads encourages us all to use the previews of C# 8 and let him know if you find a problem.

Full show notes

Dane Hillard, software engineer and author, discusses what he considers to be some of the important principles of software development.

Details

Who he is, what he does. A little about his book. Separation of concerns, what it means, how to do it, good naming, method length. Abstraction and encapsulation, what it is, good examples and bad examples. Good programming in industry. Improving performance, profiling, when to optimize, trusting third party packages. Testing code, unit vs integration, mocking; performance and load testing, locust. Security, when to add it in, feature switches.

Full show notes

Matt Warren discusses what considers to be the biggest changes to the .NET runtime over the past four years.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Why he's interested in the runtime. Runtime vs base class libraries, cross platform. Just in Time compilation (JITing); tiered compilation, can boost speed of third party libraries. Monitoring and diagnostics. Spans, Tech Empower rating. Default interface methods. Unloading assemblies. Relationship between Framework and Core. Community involvement over the years.

Full show notes

Mark Eisenberg discusses why enterprises should adopt microservices, what is stopping them, and how they can overcome those problems.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Mark's interest in microservices. What a microservice is, why it is important, why it is difficult; what he means by "enterprise". What enterprises are currently doing - using new technology in an old way. Are enterprises changing for the wrong reasons; what are the right reasons - "fear". Time to market and scale is very short, think of Uber, Airbnb, etc. Product Enterprises don't always see the threat that is coming. Changes needed - culture, support from business units, CI/CD, build security in from start, cloud is not necessary, Jez Humble's book Accelerate, everything has to change. Better, faster, cheaper is what the execs are interested. Microsoft's recommendations on getting microservices into the enterprise. Concrete steps an enterprise can take - training, developers should be driving the change. Don't start with "can't", focus on what and why.

Full show notes

Rafał Legiędź talks about augmented and virtual reality and their unexpectedly long history.

Details

How to pronounce his name, who he is, what he does. Types of reality, augmented, mixed, virtual. What is VR. What is AR, not just vision, noise cancelling headphones. car reversing cameras. Quick history or AR starting in 1862. State of the art now, HoloLens, MagicLeap. Who is using the technology in industry. How to start developing for HoloLens. How to find Rafał.

Full show notes

Amy Kapernick loves CSS Grid Layout and thinks you should use it too!

Details

Who she is, what she does, speaking at conference. History of layouts, table. Background of CSS grid, it makes your code smaller. What browsers support it, falling back if not supported. Usage in the industry. CSS Working Group is driving the standard. No relationship to bootstrap. What's coming in the next version. Where you can find more info on CSS grid, or catch Amy at a conference.

Full show notes

Cliff Agius, software developer and airline pilot, talks about how he built a bionic hand for a 15 year old.

Details

Who he is, what he does, finding time to fly and code. Why he's building a bionic arm; cost of custom built arm. Open source bionic arm, OpenBionic; 3D printing parts, other components, motors; spare parts are easy. The control board; sensors attached to arm send signals to control board. Choosing the grip. Ada fruit board, meadow feather board. Software to design new grips. All Cliff's code is open source. Total cost of materials £500. To build your own arm with Cliff's code and design - about a weekend's work. Mass production. How to find Cliff and his work.

Full show notes

Arthur Doler, developer and mental health advocate talks about the challenges he has faced and how to help others in the workplace.

Details

Who he is, what he does, why he's interested in mental health, mental health issues in the developer population; art talks about autism, bipolar disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder. A bad day vs a disorder, DSM 5. What to do if you or a colleague has a problem. Diagnostic language vs experiential language. You can't leave your personal life at the office door. How to help a colleague. Dealing with a mental health crisis. How we as an industry can improve things, work-life balance.

Full show notes

Bob Crowley talks to me about many of the useful debugging features of Visual Studio.

Details

Who he is, what he does. How hard is debugging. Why debugging is important. Should debugging be taught in university. Knowing the tech stack. Intercepting requests, Postman, Fiddler and packet sniffers. Looking at the SQL generated by Entity Framework and other ORMs. Visual Studio tools for debugging, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, bookmarks, traversing the call-stack, immediate, locals and watches. Visual Studio vs Visual Studio Code. Tracking down an elusive problem, look at the environment and dependencies; CI/CD, clouds and containers. Talking a walk. Rubber Duck Debugging. How to find Bob.

Full show notes

Security researcher Scott Helme tells me how Content Security Policy and Subresource Integrity are used to fight cross site scripting.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What cross site scripting is; well known examples; how it works; crypto mining with cross site scripting (XSS). Input validation, output encoding, more frameworks are handling validation. Content Security Policy (CSP), what it is, how it works; trusting CDNs; how to use CSP on a site, CSP Wizard, browser support; future changes. Subresource Integrity, what it is, how it works; trusting third party scripts; what happens if script fails validation. NoScript, browser extensions, DNS filters and VPNs. Scott's upcoming events; training.

Full show notes

Kee Jeffreys talks about the Loki, a privacy network for secure financial transactions and communications.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What Loki is, differences from What's App/Signal/Telegram, issues with peer-to-peer. Sending money with Loki. Why we need more privacy. How Loki works; how metadata gives you away; how the nodes work, incentives. Size of the network. Open source. Poisoned nodes. What Loki will do if a crypto weakness is discovered. Compromised client hardware. How Loki is funded. Money laundering. Encrypted message apps and deaths. Australian laws affecting Loki.

Full show notes

Morgan Bruce author of Microservices in Action talks about how and why he builds microservices.

Details

Who he is, what he does, his stack. Morgan's book. What is a microservice, difference between microservice and monolith; are monoliths still ok. What to do with a new application. How small should a microservice be. Can a microservice be made up of multiple languages. Microservices calling other microservices; service discovery. Tracing requests across services, tracing on buses. Keeping a copy of data or calling another microservice. Bounded contexts, getting the boundaries right. Deploying, scaling, rolling back. Monitoring. Redeploying a faulty container. Are microservices worth the trouble.

Full show notes

John Maglione explains how you can take charge of your career and reach the goals you set

** Details **

Who he is, what he does. How to find a good recruiter. Career management vs career development. Actively managing your career - learning new technologies, handling change, moving cities. Planning the steps of your career from junior dev to... on the technical route; from junior dev to... on the managerial route; learning new skills; professional certificates. How to prepare for layoffs. Balancing career management vs life.

Full show notes

Michael Dowden tells me how FlexePark build a completely serverless application with Firebase.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What is serverless computing, how it differs from traditional and container based computing. What Firebase is, its ecosystem ; where the business logic lives. Progressive web apps, languages you can use with Firebase. Where Firebase "lives". Why Michael chose Firebase. Storing data, real time database, cloud Firestore. Accessing other data and api's. Firebase suite of tools, authentication and authorization "oauth in 15 minutes with Firebase", using authentication by itself. Crashlytics and track.js. Configuration tools. Deploying your application, easy app rollbacks. How much it costs.

Full Show Notes

Brandon Byars, creator of Mountebank talks about testing microservices with that tool, and more general testing patterns for microservices.

** Details **

Who he is, what he does. Quick overview of Mountebank and service virtualization. Types of testing, faking vs mocking. Challenges of testing, determinism. What is mountebank, stubbing HTTP, TCP and SMPT. Proxy and replay; types of response. Client side package. Where Mountebank fits in with HTTP client mocking. Other tools like Mountebank. Mountebank in a CI/CD pipeline. What's next for Mountebank, an invitation to contribute.

Full show notes

Joshua Sheppard of Infinite Campus tells my about their data science and machine learning projects and how you can start your own.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What is data science, is a data scientist a role or a team, what skills are needed. Data vs big data. When does SQL + math become science, how to get started, Python, R and other languages; trying to follow software engineering principles when doing data science, testing, source control, etc. Azure and AWS machine learning, getting your data in to the cloud. Moving to production, scaling. Josh's data and insights into the school districts in Kentucky. Applying insights to other locations. Home baking your data science project vs leveraging the cloud platforms, it's all about access to data. Future of the field.

Full show notes

Mark Rendle tells me why gathering metrics is so important, how to do it with .NET Core and how to analyze what you have collected.

Full Details

Who he is, what he does, training videos. Event Tracing for Windows and diagnostic source, tracking numbers. Logging versus diagnostics, turning on diagnostics, writing to diagnostic sources, things that already write to diagnostic sources, how to see diagnostic sources in action. Time series database, InfluxDb, cross referencing with logging, comparing InfluxDb to Prometheus, Grafana; Mark's library for InfluxDb, why it is very efficient. Memory allocation and garbage collection. Using the data in InfluxDb. Loupe logging, monitoring and metrics tool. Mark advises you measure everything, his upcoming and past talks.

Full show notes

Niall Merrigan, security researcher tells me about bug hunting and the best hacks he has seen.

Full Details

Who he is, what he does. Bug hunting, crowd sourcing the hunters, bug bounties, should you invite attacks on production, Hacker One and Bug Crowd. IoT is the most attacked software; smart cars, aircraft. Security.txt. Responsible disclosure, what do if you find a bug, Niall's experience when reporting a particular bug. Even when bugs are known and acknowledged they are not necessarily fixed; industry code systems, hacks designed to kill. Is every hack is a "sophisticated hack", the @mat hack. Are you a target for hacks. The most impressive hack Niall has seen. Physical access to device, hak5 rubber duckie. Supply chain injection*. Hacking a cat.

* We recorded this episode before the Super Micro story broke.

Full show notes

Joe McBride creator GrpahQL .NET tells me about his implementation of the GraphQL standard.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What GraphQL is, protocol agnostic, type safe. Why use GraphQL; queries, fields. Why use GraphQL, how it is being used, some missing features. OData as a substitute for GraphQL. Why Joe built GraphQL.Net, the bus rule. How compliant GraphQL.Net is with the standard. The GraphQL UI. A practical example reducing the number of columns requested by the ORM. Unit testing. GraphQL as backend for your frontend. Upcoming React conference in Nevada.

Full show notes

Jon Smith talks to me about Entity Framework Core 2.1, how to organize your EF code to meet the principles of domain driven design and his recent book on the topic.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Leaving tech and coming back. Differences between EF 6 and EF Core, no more db initializer or data validation (by default), better adding and updating, lazy loading, less bugs in Core 2. How to layout your models, DTO's, business logic, getters and setters, action methods and where to perform queries. Measuring performance and scalability of Entity Framework; Bryan rants about measuring performance yourself, Dapper vs EF, does performance always matter ; Entity Framework Extensions and Dapper Plus from ZZZ Projects. Unit testing, Ensure Created, how to test calls to stored procs with EF.

Full show notes

Laura Elizabeth explains how engineers can improve their design skills.

Details

Who she is, what she does. Why developers should care about design. Bryan's PowerPoint slides are better than they used to be. Where to start learning design, iterate your design. How do you know if the design is good, getting others to look at the site, making use of negative feedback. look at other sites for inspiration. Accessibility is important. Common problems in design. Knowing when the design is complete.

Full show notes

Jay Gambetta of IBM talks about their new Quantum Information Science Kit which makes it easy to running chemistry, artificial intelligence and optimization applications on quantum computers.

Details

Who he is, what he does, quick overview of IBM Quantum Experience. Qiskit, Terra and Aqua, compilers, providers, simulators, experiment with chemistry, AI and optimization. Integration with existing software libraries. Reasons why quantum is better for some types of problems. Why use QISKIT instead of running on quantum hardware. IMB is Q Network. Start of the commercial quantum computing, who is involved, hard to define commercial. Can small companies get involved. IBM's research in the quantum world. Coherence and reducing error rates to allow algorithms to run longer. Where we might be in a few years, error. How to get started with quantum.

Full show notes

Spencer Schneidenbach talks about REST APIs, what makes a good one, who should design it, how to document it and why developer experience is so important.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Designing an api, the consumer should drive the design, is the developer the main consumer, is the business a customer? What REST is, RPC, nouns not verbs, querying, SEARCH verb, PUT and PATCH, common conventions. Changing how an API works, versioning, version management. Importance of documentation, error code docs, who writes the docs. Consistency, good api design is user experience for developers, Spencer loves Twillo.

Full show notes

Andrew Lock, blogger and author of ASP.NET Core in Action talks to me about the .NET Core and why you should probably use it instead of Framework.

Details

Who he is, what he does. His book. Why did Microsoft build .NET Core, the complications of Web API Core running on Framework. Platforms it works on. New configuration system, typed configs. Dependency injection is built-in now, a mention of HttpClientFactory. Middleware, pipelines to perform tasks. Authentication and authorization, policy server. Kestrel server.

Full show notes

Jeff Glennon used to be an agile consultant helping companies align their departments to deliver better software, but he left that world behind and is now the Chief Operations Officer at Night Shift Distributing, a distributor of craft beers and other beverages in Massachusetts. Jeff talks to me about his move, the skills he brought with him and what he has learned.

Details

What he used to do, moving to Nightshift Brewing, bringing his skills from the software world. Setting goals, doing it as a team, "commitments", scaling, going beyond the local customers, opening another location. Being the chief operating officer and leading sales at same time. Differences and similarities between agile consulting and role as COO.
An agile approach to beer distribution, partnering with their customers, when to drop a partner.
Scaling problems, logistical challenges, capital investments, big decisions affect many families, how they make big decisions, strategy is a day to day and week to week thing. Three to five year plan. It's not lines of code it's beer, the similarities between the software and beer worlds. What he has learned in two years, "the value of stopping for a second", saying no and letting people challenge you is important. Jeff doesn't plan to go back to tech. "It's just beer"

Jimmy Bogard creator of AutoMapper, MediatR and HtmlTags talks to me about his move into the world of containers.

Details

Who he is, what he does, his open source projects. What containers are, why use them, containers are like Lego bricks. How many apps to a container. Windows containers types. Differences between Windows and Linux containers, why choose over the other, size and ease of scaling; if you choose Linux you need to know something about Linux admin. Do apps need to written in a different way to work on containers. Be mindful of the size of Windows containers. Is an app in a container a microservice. Jimmy Bogard's liver. Jimmy likes Microsoft docs on containers.

Michael Brett of QxBranch tells me about their work in the world of commercial quantum computing, their software and where he sees the industry going.

Details

Who he is, what he does, history of QxBranch, predictive analytics - financial, pharmaceutical, gas industries. Quick overview of quantum and the limits of traditional computing. Why Australia has so much quantum computing experience. State of the art. Cloud based quantum computing. Examples of use, financial world. Building software, early stage hardware and simulators; every hardware.

Cliff Agius, software engineer and pilot of Boeing 787's talks about decision making above the clouds and in the office.

Details

Who he is, what he does, flying and coding. Critical decision making, what it is, an aircraft has thousands of computers, types of decision - impulsive vs considered, caging the chimp. Types of response, chimp (instinctive) , rule based (check list) , human (think your way through); managing the chimp response in others. TDODAR a decision making framework - time/team, diagnosis, options, decision, assign, review. How to hear more from Cliff.

Steve Gordon and I talk about the new Http Client Factory in .Net Core 2.1. We cover what's new, what's different and how to use Polly, the .NET resilience framework with it.

Details

Who he is, what he does, meetup group, Humanitarian Toolbox. What is wrong with Http Client, exhausting sockets; using a singleton, DNS problems. Http Client Factory, creates a client pool, using DI to create the clients, named and typed clients, testing. Http Client Handlers. Using Polly with Http Client, differentiating between policies for a given endpoint, wrapping, calling delegates.

Ben Watson, software engineer at Microsoft working on Bing and author of Writing High Performance .NET Code talks to me about his book and how to improve your code.

Details

Who he is, what he does, working on Bing lead to the book, Bing is probably the biggest C# app in the world. Why worry about performance, pay for play, serverless; sometimes more machines are the best solution. Where to start with the CLR, the garbage collector, JIT, be careful of enum flags. More on GC, using generations to improve efficiency, aim for very short lived or very long-lived memory, memory efficiency is as important as CPU efficiency. What about the network, async await all the way down, Ben likes TPL, "immutability is key". LINQ hides allocations, closures delegates. Be careful with Func and Actions, delegates cause allocations. Spans. Concurrent collections. Just in Time, small methods compile faster, Bing loads thousands of dlls. Readability and maintainability vs performance. for vs foreach.

Todd Gardner, founder of TrackJS talks about building its and his own brands, speaking, and growing a company.

Details

Who he is, what he does, pub conf. What TrackJS is. Why having a good product is not enough, talk about it as much as building it, present at conferences. How he sold to the big companies like Google, StackOverflow and Microsoft, hiring sales people. Moving from developer to running the company. Todd's brand and the TrackJS brand. How to build a brand, minimum viable personality. Pitfalls as a company grows, don't start at web scale, don't focus on the tech. What Todd likes most about running a business. NDC conference Minnesota and pub conf are coming to Minnesota.

Ben Cull tells be about his move from being a developer to the founder of a starup, why he decided to make the change and the success and failures along the way.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Starting a product, knowing what to build. How to transition away from the day job, become a free lancer, when did does the startup start paying. Finding the market fit for your product, target a small market, find advocates among your customers, figuring out your cash flow. Treating your dependencies as relationships, it's all about people.

Felienne Hermans has been asking the question "What is programming?", in this podcast she tells me why it is an important question and what she has found out.

Details

Who she is, what she does. Felienne's research into what programming is, why it is important. Her general findings. Excel as an intro to programming, Excel is functional. Programming with kids, code smells, code quality and how it affected understanding. It's hard to see beyond your own bad code. Programming as writing, making it appealing by comparing it to story telling. Transitioning to more formal programming. Programming Sucks article by Peter Welch. Encouraging people to learn programming, how can we help, some home work from Felienne.

Adam Ralph talks about the challenges of distributed systems, queues, coupling, and how NServiceBus helps with microservices, SOA and long running processes.

Details

Who he is, being "a white space bigot"; what he does; working for Particular, evangelist and engineer. What NServiceBus is, infrastructure for distributed systems, queues, retires. History of NServiceBus, commercial and free versions. Main reasons to us NServiceBus - abstracts the message transport, retires, deduplication and the fallacies of network computing, insights into the flow of messages, monitoring on the transport system. Publish/subscribe. Sagas for long running processes, saving state, an example of a saga in action, sagas can run infinitely. Loose coupling, "pit of success"; different kinds of coupling - temporal, location, logical. an example of decoupled ordering service, thin events vs fat events, contract coupling, set an id very early. What scale do you need to be at to use NServiceBus. How to get started with NServiceBus. Monitoring what is happening. NServiceBus on containers. Adam is running a workshop in May at Micro CPH, Copenhagen.

Kjersti Sandberg and Charlotte Lyng of the Norwegian Developer Conference tell me what goes into organizing four major conferences around the world.

Details

Who they are, what they do. A little about how the conferences started. What is the Norwegian Developer Conference; spreading around the world, London, Oslo, Minnesota, Sydney. How they organize the conferences, finding local partners, crew, contractors, quality over quantity. How the conference grew. Balancing the content of the conference to suit attendees, choosing the conference tracks, choosing the speakers, new and established presenters. How NDC attracts the big names. Why attend conferences when there is so much content online. Timeline of a conference, planning starts a year ahead. An invitation to Minnesota, Oslo and Sydney.

Mark Eisenberg talks about the very long life of the software monolith, when it started, and how we have been trying to escape it since.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What is a monolith, tell-tale signs of a monolith, coupling and decoupling. Why we built monoliths. N-tiers and monoliths. Software is rarely a green field. Were we ever able to swap tiers. Advantages of a monolith, it's familiar. Companies need a visionary to effect change. Risk raises its head. SOA didn't work, client server didn't work, n-tier didn't work. Successful companies went from monoliths to microservices when they needed to. RPC is from the 1960s, are you running one piece of code on one machine or ten machines. How to get off the monolith, find a visionary. Time to respond to a challenge is very short. Microsoft is a good example of a large company changing.

Aaron Bedra talks to me about threat modelling, why you should do and what to cover.

Details

Who he is, what he does. What is threat modeling and how he approaches it. Types of security, loss of money, loss of life. Should you secure something if it is not valuable. Are we in a post security world? How often your site is attacked. How to decide what to protect. Regulations and breaches. How to protect your system, watch for outgoing data. How to build secure software from the start. Hashed passwords are not as secure as you think. Encryption and input validation. How to check third party libraries. Better software practices lead to better security. How much security is enough, "if you are investing more than you could lose, you're doing it wrong".

Veronika Kolesnikova talks to me about Xamarin and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What is Xamarin. What are cognitive services, why so many services; artificial intelligence vs machine learning vs deep learning, training models. He she got started in Xamarin; it's part of Visual Studio, SDKs and testing tools, Xamarin live player debugging on device. Why use cognitive services, examples of use. Types of cognitive services - labs, vision, face, speech, translator, language understanding intelligence service. Should I train my own model. Recommendations API. It started with Bing, how is it to use, examples. People to follow - Paige Bailey, Seth Juarez. Veronika is presenting at Visual Studio Live, Las Vegas.

Tomas Petricek talks about software correctness, its history and future.

Details

Who he is and what he does, his book on F#. Alan Turing Institute. Software as an engineering discipline, software as art. History of errors in software, errors in hardware. Software was never in crisis. Using types to help with correctness, how different languages do it, some complications, a new language would be needed. Upcoming improvements in correctness. Other projects Tomas is involved in.

Part two of a two part recording with Mark Seemann on dependency rejection.

Details

No mocking needed for unit testing, command query separation. Do you still use some DI in impure functions; partial applications, Mark is not a fan of DI containers and doesn't know of any for F#. Are partial functions functional, Haskell keeps its impure functions at the edge, "impure-pure-impure sandwich" sandwich - the origin of the word "sandwich", an example of a translator application, don't lose sight of the other tenets of programming, upcoming conferences.

Part one of a two part recording with Mark Seemann on dependency injection and rejection in F#.

Details

Who he is, what he does. The new video site. Used to earn from C#, now earns from F# but would like to earn from Haskell; how much dev is going on in F#. Dependency rejection; side effects, purity and determinism. Impure functions. Pure and impure calling each other. Dijkstra, abstractions and monoids.

Steve Elliot, CEO of Agile Craft talks to me about re-architecting software, why it should be done, when to do it, and how to do it well.

Details

Who he is, what he does. When to re-architect, monitor usage patterns, out of date ui, spaghetti code, ratio of bug fixes to new code, not mobile enabled, difficulty recruiting, market opportunity. Making a decision, who gets a say. How to measure success on a long-term project. Practical steps for moving to new architecture. What to start with, easy or hard pieces; what to do next; how to keep the old system going. What about people who don't want to learn new things. Dealing with remote offices. How to keep the project on track and the momentum going.

Jay Gambetta manager for quantum theory and computing at IBM talks to me about the IBM Quantum Experience.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Why is quantum computing different, entanglement and interference. How do quantum computers look, cryogenic refrigerators, close to absolute zero. IBM's history in quantum computing. What is the quantum experience, how a program goes from the cloud app to the supercooled quantum computer; free and open access to 5 and 16 qbit computers; how to write a program (called a circuit); examples of circuits; is 16 qbits enough for real problems. When can we break encryption with quantum computing, why error correction is so important. Popularity of quantum experience, how soon will a submitted circuit run; using python to submit circuits; what is the "Hello World" of quantum computing; how to write a python program for the quantum experience. Community involvement. Future of quantum, becoming a technology, what about the temperature requirements. Chaotic and exciting times coming.

Doc Norton tells me why measuring agile velocity is a bad idea and what to do instead.

Details

Who he is, what he does. "Escape Velocity", why he wrote a book on agile metrics. What velocity is, rate of delivering value to customer, "it is useless", estimates are "bunk". "The business" pushes velocity based estimates. Lack of trust throughout organization. Can we really reduce a complex problem down to a simple number. Anti patterns: more velocity, cross team velocity comparisons, estimating with time, measuring individual velocity. Side effects of metrics. Variable velocity. What should we measure, cycle time and lead time, fixing bottle necks, code quality, team joy. Where does dev ops come in. How to find Doc's book. Upcoming conferences.

Angela Dugan tells me about impostor syndrome, why it matters and what you can do about it.

Details

Who she is, what she does. What impostor syndrome is, Hanselman's post. Who is affected by it. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know; being an "expert"; why is "I don't know" not acceptable, do agile sprints and commitments force unreasonable expectations. Angela's impostor syndrome survey. The opposite of impostor syndrome - Dunning–Kruger. Should one do anything about it; teaching what you learn. Angela might retake the test. Angela suggests helping others with impostor syndrome.

Josh Doody talks about salaries, how they are set and how to negotiate a higher one.

Details

Who he is and what he does. What is a salary negotiation coach, negotiation by proxy. Who can benefit from Josh's help, how to get his book. Salary structures, what they are and how they work. Estimating your market value; judging your value compared to others, Bryan disagrees with Josh, John Sonmez says "ask for the moon". The interview, preparation, never share your current salary or desired salary. How to negotiate the salary; how to counter offer; the final discussion; "there is nothing fair about salary". How to leave a job. How to ask for more money in a job. Wrap up.

Dustin Campbell talks about the future of C# 7.1, 7.2 and beyond.

Details

Who he is and what he does, Mads and the other guy, cross platform experience, playing guitar. Why move to incremental c# releases, bug fixes, move language forward more quickly, csharplang on GitHub, changes needed to compiler, C# releases are tied to Visual Studio releases. Could C# become a NuGet package. Preventing accidental use of 7.1. Possible dates. Release cadence, halting problem. Speed of change of c# vs ASP.Net, slow evolution is the plan. Balancing features and performance against ease of use. More pattern types coming. Shapes and extensions, extension everything - properties, constructors. Optional interfaces. The future of c#. A question from Jon Skeet for Dustin.

Laurent Bossavit talks about the myths like the 10x developer that have grown in the software industry.

Details

Who he is, what he does. His book - "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering", why he wrote it. The 10x developer, literary archeology. The telephone game, examples in the software world, cost of when defects are discovered. Industry does not have interest exposing faults, why is the word "belief" used in software, is software an engineering discipline, opinions over measurements, how did we end up with manifestos. What should we measure when judging software quality, why measuring bugs are like eating from the garbage can. How to make things better. How to get Laurent's book. Laurent's book recommendations.

Amy Sterling and Chris Jordan of EyeWire talk about mapping the neurons and synapses of the brain.

Details

Who they are, what is EyeWire, how it started. About the brain, 80 billion neurons in a human brain, 100 trillion synapses. It used to take 1000 hours to map a neuron now it takes 80 hours. 250,000 users from around the world. Combined effort of players and AI. EyeWire is focusing on 1 cubic mm of a brain which has a 100,000 neurons and billion synapses. Where EyeWire's data goes after mapping. Why are they building EyeWire, to learn why we are the way we are, we don't know how many types of cell are in the brain. The EyeWire tech stack. Building a community, media engagement, internships, competitions. Moving towards open source for parts of EyeWire. How they make money, or not! Future work, IARPA. Joining EyeWire or other citizen science projects, World VR forum, Games for Change.

David Mead of Start With Why talks about improving communication skills, leadership and handling conflict.

Details

Simon Sinek and start with why, David's own background. Start with why, golden circle. What we do, how we do it, why we do it; without why it is much harder to differentiate ourselves. Most companies start with what, examples of companies that start with why. People like to be around people like them and believe what they believe. Imperfect companies can have a nobel higher goal.
How can engineers improve their communication; it's a skill that can be learned; give people tasks and roles that inspire. Better communication across the whole organization, sharing the big picture. Simple tips to improve communication skills, set goals that are attainable with low risk. How to handle conflict, don't take a position against something, stand for something. Conflict as a useful tool to resolve issues. What to do if conflict has become the norm, get back to the why; what to do when the why is not enough, "we can't fix people, we can provide the environment where they can be inspired to change themselves". Don't promote because of skill; when leading a team you are responsible for the team not the job, "management is about getting stuff done, leadership is about people". Always keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Patrick Smacchia creator of NDepend explains how this tool can improve the quality of your code.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Why he is interested in code quality. NDepend is 10 years old. Transitioning from free to commercial. What is static analysis. Comparing NDepend to other tools, Roslyn analyzer. Finding spaghetti code, all rules are linq queries. Measuring technical debt, estimating the cost of fixing the code vs leaving it alone. Call graphs, dependency matrix, tree map, code coverage. Visual Studio Team Services plugin, quality gates, comparing code coverage per release, testability and maintainability. NDepend can analyze dlls, it looks at the intermediate language. Patrick loves the book "CLR via C#", Bryan talks about the time Jeffrey Richter stared him down. Future work. Getting a free trial. How to really pronounce Smacchia.

Bill Wagner discusses the new Microsoft documentation service, a new way of learning about Microsoft's development offerings.

Details

Who he is, what he does, upcoming talks in Portland, Vermont, Boston and Sydney. The new .NET documentation project, why they are doing it, reorganizing the docs to help solve problems. New docs give more context, e.g. thread safety, advice on usage. Picking what to write about. Open to user contributions. Who keeps the docs up to date, internal pull requests; third party tools and platforms. Documentation for developers with non .NET backgrounds. Monitoring traffic to docs. Docs as a compliment to stack overflow. Bryan complains about lack of full samples - Bill talks about very a large example eShopOnContainers. Walkthroughs. How to request new docs. Why some of C# and .NET is not open source, process of open sourcing. Updates to Bill's books, invite to help with docs.

Eric Schles talks about a set of tools he is building to identify and filter fake news stories.

Details

Who he is, a story on human trafficking. Importance of identifying "fake news". News Literacy Project, how Eric got involved. Manually categorizing news stories. Building software to the job, metrics to identify "fake news", stitch fix, word distance map, comparing to the manual process. Eric loves python, scraping. Other applications, machine generating long form content, "machines writing books". Providing an API. Scaling to handle large volumes; python 3.6; Asyncio and Kafka. Bias in the software; yellow journalism in 1890s and 1920s. How to help.

Dylan Reisenberger talks about Polly, a resilience and transient-fault-handling library for .NET. Commonly used for retries, circuit breaking and fallback when calling remote services.

Details

Who he is. Quick overview of Polly, why do I need Polly - the network is not reliable. History of the Polly project. How popular it is. What a resilience framework is. Retries in Polly; backoff; doing other things during the retry. Policies, what they are. Handling exceptions and result codes. Circuit breaker; what it is; why use them. Using policies together, wrapping. Stability patterns, bulkhead isolation. Queues. How to execute a web request with Polly. Using Polly for things other than web requests. Re-authorization of requests. No .NET alternatives. Future work, caching, policy registry, metrics, reactive extensions. How to help.

Ben Day, Pluralsight author and consultant talks about dev ops in the Microsoft world and how to introduce it in your organization.

Details

Dev ops will solve everything. definition is hard to pin down. Three questions, 1) how long from checkin to deployment, 2) what are the steps to get code deployed, 3) how much time is spent on production support issues. Why do we need dev ops. Who takes on the role of dev ops. What Microsoft offers. All the way from local dev to release. Do dev teams get dev ops members. People don't like change. Dev ops "levels of awesomeness". Seeing it really work. Continuous release with Microsoft, Ben's Pluralsight course, how quickly can we move code from dev to production.

Rachel Roumeliotis of O'Reilly Media spoke to me about technology and development trends for 2017.

Details

Who she is and what she does. Upcoming conferences, OSCON and Fluent. Rachel and I discuss tech trends for 2017: open source, the big players, can every company do it? Code is not the only value, customer lock-in. "All businesses are software businesses", how common is that perception, is dev over valued sometimes. "Infrastructure changes", very hard to keep up, big companies telling small companies that they are doing things wrong. "The year of AI", again; AI silos, no overarching system. Keeping the customer in mind when working with tech.

Michael Biercuk, director of the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney talks to me about quantum computing and the future it will lead to.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Quick overview of quantum computing. How traditional computers work, transistors, charge etc. Moore's law, transistor size, nanometer size, tunneling. When quantum effects start to cause problems. What problems can only quantum computing solve; quantum supremacy. Can quantum computing crack ssl certs; decoherence is the big problem and how to delay it; finding a catalyst for the Haber process. Why is quantum computing faster. Programming a quantum computer. Bits, qbits and 1 & 0 at same time ; if...else with qbits. Current state of the art, academic, industrial and small commercial/startup. What will unlocking quantum computing do for us; computing is advancing every field; if we get to 300 qbits! Michael thinks harnessing quantum computing will transform society.

Steve Ellmore, co-founder and president of Disbelief tells me that games are a collaborative effort and how game dev differs from other dev.

Details

Who he is. What he does. His first games was in BASIC. What Disbelief does. "A game is a piece of art that can move". Game dev is iterative and never the vision of one person, why it is thought to be that way. The visionary is more of a guide, deciding what to include and exclude. Hundreds of people involved. Using game engines. Prototyping, "made four games and shipped one". Avoiding "group think". Sequels are common, holding back features. Sharing ideas between devs and companies. What happens after prototyping - playing end to end, the doldrums, getting it back together, closing stages, technical debt, making a product. How long a game takes to make. Specialized work of Disbelief, frame rates, VR. Disbelief is hiring in Boston and Chicago.

Ben Day, Plualsight author, coach and trainer talks to me about real world agile and scrum.

Details

Who he is, what he does, Pluralsight, how long it takes to make a course; what agile and scrum are, agile is abstract, scrum is concrete; why daily standups are boring, shortening the cycle between dev and qa; Bryan doesn't think you need the meetings if the project is going well, Ben explains why you do; scrum masters should not be project managers, scrum masters are coaches, scrum masters are not leaders; Ben doesn't like the three common stand up questions; scrum should provide a framework; "multitasking is death"; people don't like being screamed at, how to deal with unrealistic expectations; software development vs software delivery; agile and scrum forget that people are involved, "Ben Day - Therapist for Teams"; it's all about people, leave ego out of it, Difficult Conversations; Ben's scrum courses on Pluralsight.

Mads Torgersen, program manager for C# at Microsoft, talks to me about the upcoming release of C# 7.

Details

Who he is, being the C# program manager; the favorite features he introduced as PM - linq and async, why linq was added, does the C# increment big features, was async as much of a success, complications are too well hidden, Stephen Toub blog; Mads won't tell me when C# 7 is coming out, new features, tuples + deconstruction, pattern matching; how Mads manages C#, boundaries and disagreements with other teams; who makes decisions – being a "reluctant dictator"; managing resources at Microsoft; Microsoft and the C# standards bodies, why have the standards when Microsoft can do what they want; C# and the open source community, drawbacks of open source; final notes.

Rachel Appel talks to me about accessibility and how a more accessible website makes a better website.

Details

Who she is, what she does; the Rachii; assistive technology, what they are, examples of tech; standards bodies; simple changes that help; why make a site more accessible, skip links, screen readers - NVDA, ads cause lots of problems; more easy changes that help; webaim.org; even more easy changes to a site; what to do if you can't change the site yourself, a11y.

Jimmy Bogard talks about AutoMapper, why and how he built, and recent performance improvements.

Details

Who he is, what he does; how AutoMapper started, what it is; projections, what that are, how they work, expression trees; early mistakes, inspired by Structure Map, performance problems, difficulties with projections, rewrite, how Jimmy uses AutoMapper vs how other people use it, learning from other mappers, improving performance, expression trees are hard to debug; upcoming conferences.

Samantha Stone, author and CMO of the Marketing Advisory Network talks me about tech product launches, marketing and sales.

Details

Who she is, what she does; her book; complex sales process, what it is and how it differs from a simple process; launching and positioning a tech product, going to market, don't build for the largest audience; engineers might not have the skills needed to target a product; how to prioritize the right product for development; focus on differentiation but pick the right ones, four steps; differences between sales and marketing, when to hire those roles, pivoting is not always a good thing, marketing comes before sales.

This is part two of my interview with Jon Skeet, we continue from part 1 with some more on C# before discussing the Google Cloud Platform.

Details

.Net Core; is C# Jon's second language? starting on Spectrum, BBC Micro, writing his own language, c, Java was first professional language, took up C# in 2001, "Java is not that bad a language"; Google Cloud Platform, what differentiates Google from the other cloud platforms, Jon aims to make the best c# libraries; Stackoverflow "this could be my next form of addiction"; listener questions - why so many languages; keep it simple when learning and learn one thing at time; how Jon divides his time, work life balance, "don't do anything you don't enjoy or believe to be beneficial to the world".

This is part one of a two parter with Jon Skeet, here we talk about Noda Time and all things time, date, time zones and offsets. We also chat about the C# specification. In part two we cover the Google Cloud Platform.

Details

Who he is, what he does, Google briefly (more in part two); Noda Time, history, time libraries are bad, v1 is forever, databases store datetime badly too, what is wrong with current libraries, DateTime.Now is bad, time zones and offsets, how to store and transfer Noda Time, UTC and local times; C# specification, "Mads Toegensen is the nicest person in the world", C# standards bodies, how the language changes.

Stephanie Viccari tells me about the Boston chapter of Girl Develop It, an organizations that encourages women to enter software
development professions.

Details

Who she is, what she does; Girl Develop It, Code and Coffee Boston, any one can go, wide range of technologies in use; getting a degree or not, easier to target web dev, cost of education vs benefit, are bootcamps a replacement for degrees, ease of getting started with development; how to join or help Girl Develop It.

Brock Allen talks to me about Identity Server, authentication and balancing a consulting job with an open source project.

Details

Who he is and what he does; what Identity Server is and how it works, OpenId Connect, OAuth 2, examples of the protocols; Dominick Baier; what's wrong with a username and password, single sign on; how Identity Server works, can use multiple types of authentication, federation gateway pattern, third party permissions; Identity Server users, claims, roles, authorization, policy based authorization; are they building it for Microsoft, other third party libraries Microsoft is pushing; testing Identity Server; balancing consulting and building Identity Server; release candidate.

Xavier Decoster and Maarten Balliauw of MyGet talk to me about their service and how to grow a company while keeping a full time job.

Details

Who they are and how they met, what MyGet does, why not store package locally, cdn, load balanced; symbols and symbol servers, debugging; npm and bower; the tech behind MyGet; going from an idea and code to a company, going from free to a business, developing a business model; dealing with business laws, tax, etc; being part time, balancing the full time job with the business and life; challenges of selling to big companies; deciding on the price; hard to provide professional services and support; comparing and communicating with competitors, ProGet, Microsoft uses MyGet for many projects including .net core; considering investors; dealing with the practicalities, tax, vat, "banking is a sick world"; the day Microsoft nearly brought down MyGet ; 2 TB of data uploaded every month, 7 TB downloaded, MyGet by the numbers; getting feedback and supporting customers.

Suparna Damany, physical therapist and hand therapist, author of It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, talks to me about repetitive strain injuries and how prevent or treat them.

Details

Who she is and what she does, patients with repetitive strain injuries are getting younger; we are not meant to be static, 8 year old patient; repetitive strain injuries (RSI) are common in many professions, one problem leads to another; general fitness doesn't prevent repetitive strain injuries, we are really not meant to be static, onset can seem sudden; vary activity throughout day, it all comes down to blood flow and oxygen; how to fit activity into your work day, drink lots of water; use of braces, body has great capacity for healing, getting to root the cause; carpal tunnel - what it is and what it is not; when to go to a professional therapist, focus on prevention, good posture, catching the problem early is better; Suparna's book, exercises, stretches, workspace layout; parting advice for computer professionals.

David Gatti talks about developer communities, why they are important and how to build them.

Details

Who he is; what is a developer community, difference with evangelist, Amazon as an example, smaller examples; how does a community developer deliver value; how to build a community, takes time, costs money; finding the right developer to help, good speaker, good with people; community relations becomes a career path, lot of travel; does it provide a return on investment.

Mark Seemann, author, creator of AutoFixture and Plural Sight coach tells me about functional programming and F# in particular.

Details

His background, started with VB and C++, now programs in C# only for money; what functional programming is; isolating side effects to boundaries of the program; is functional programming only suitable for certain types of application; isolation, great for testing; all of .net is available; composing functions; interfaces, strategy pattern, dependency injection; differences in architecture when developing in F#, quoting Alan Kay; deploying and devops; roslyn and f#; the book that started it for Mark by Tomas Petricek, wrap up.

On Freund VP of Engineering at WeWork talks to me about how a company scales as it grows.

Details

Who he is, background; WeWork is more than a real estate company; scaling in many ways, scaling ability to manage people is most important, promotion paths; change within the organization as it grows, speed vs agility, very hard for large company to change but it is still very productive; as you reach the growth stage more communication is needed; team structure communication channels and Conway's law; team types - big fat monolith type team, changing team structure to build microservices, MVC type team, infrastructure team; does an engineer have the skills to solve the monolith, fixing feature by feature instead of doing it all in one go, we work is hiring in Manhattan and Tel Aviv.

Eric Bloom and I discuss productivity, what it means and how to be more productive in an IT environment.

Details

What is productivity, different kinds of productivity; not viewing IT as a cost centre; knowing what you are good at as a company - The Box book; how to increase your productivity, getting in the zone, picking the right task for your level of energy; culture as an influence on productivity in an organisation, how handle challenges, delegating; dealing with a bad culture, "people are often not against you, just for themselves", diversity of opinion and perspective; bringing about change; Eric's book.

Rachel Reese tells me about her work at Jet, F#, chaos testing and being one of the Rachii.

Details

Who she is; what she does at Jet, F#, why did Jet choose F#, tech.jet.com blog; does the architecture have to change for F#, what's different for a C# developer, F# readability; Pipe operator; microservices at jet, "event driven cloud based functional microservices"; dividing up microservices, bounded contexts, dividing up your teams; how to deal with multiple languages in different services, recording and replaying every single event; unit testing, property testing - FsCheck; chaos testing; geographic redundancy; The Rachii; upcoming conferences; Jet is hiring in NYC and Dublin, contact them rachel@jet.com or Aimee@jet.com.

Julie Lerman tells me all about Entity Framework Core* and her love of learning.

Details

What's new with EF, whole new code base, no EDMX, no object context, EF 6 is not going away; in memory provider for testing, better disconnected scenarios, proof of concept for NOSql, batch updates; is it production ready; learning cool things; Julie has been working on EF since 2006; books on EF; using Aurelia; Julie Lerman uses a Mac now; domain driven design; demoware vs good practices; learning from Jimmy Bogard; Julie's hectic conference schedule.

* this podcast was recorded before the rename from Entity Framework 7 to Entity Framework Core 1.

Patrick Thevoz, CEO and cofounder of Flyability tells me about their collision tolerant drone, why they build it, how it works and how it is saving lives.

Details

Who he is; what Flyability does; how they are different than other drone manufacturers; examples of usage in crevasses and dangerous industrial environments; special sensor usage on drone; how the drone tolerates crashes; buying vs building parts of the drone; software and firmware, communication protocols; safety features, loss of communication; testing, testing, testing;

Peter Waegemann author of Knowledge Capital in the Digital Society and I discuss security in the medical industry and why he advocates for less privacy.

Details

Who he is; Peter's background; overview of security in the medical field, more secure than the media suggests, less secure than it should be; Peter's views on privacy/security have changed over the years; why he was booed off stage; fear of breaches vs reality of damage done; the importance of data integrity; how privacy adversely affects outcomes; what the laws or regulations should

Alec Lazarescu, CTO of LearnBop tells me how to introduce and expand DevOps inside your organization.

Details

Who he is, what Learnbop does, how tutoring works; how Alec defines DevOps; how to introduce DevOps, lone consultant, re-branded admin team, dedicated team; why is software dev so messy; getting people to accept change, Conway's law, DevOps is about more than just dev; DevOps as facilitators; the role of microservices, harder in a big org; Simon Wardley - pioneers settlers and town planners; Spotify - squads, chapters, guilds, where do

Terrence Ryan author of Driving Technical Change tells me how to initiate change, tackle difficult colleagues and convince the boss.

Details

Who he is, driving technical change, choosing the right change to make, who makes the decision, using authority, gathering allies; skeptics - the uninformed, cynic, burned, irrational; become an expert in the change you propose; fighting the boss, target costs; universal and situational solutions, using external pressures like regulations; should you start from scratch,

Michal Klos of Localytics tells me about their big data stack and where he thinks the industry is going.

Details

Who he is, what he does; overview of the world of big data, history, batch processing, stream processing and micro batching; databases, Apache Spark, separating storage and compute; where he thinks the industry is going in the next five years, more about Spark, data lakes, query federation, Presto; how to get started with a big data project, picking technologies, doing a test; most big data projects fail, you should start small, get cross team involvement; how to scale to petabytes, start small with short expected lifespan; technologies Localytics uses, blog, they are hiring.

Bill Wagner, author, Microsoft MVP and member of the ECMA C# Standards Committee, tells me about his writing, C# 7, language standards and the move the open source.

Details

Who he is, how he writes, C# standardization, compiler implementations, .NET Foundation Advisory Council, the move to open source, port to Linux, .Net core, .Net foundation, C# 7 new features, async streams, non nullable types, better support for unity; quick tutorial on async - "go async all the way"; compiler analyzer. Book

Amir Rubin, CEO of Paracosm tells me about his company, the state of augmented reality, mixed reality and where his company fits in.

Details

Who he is, what he does, what Paracosm does; human level of understanding; what is augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality, devices, phones, tablets, headsets; virtual reality is finally here?; common uses of Paracosm's tool, engineering tasks, construction projects, how to scan, depth sensors, dealing with errors; what happens after the data is uploaded; example of game playing on 3D environment; availability of devices; future of augmented reality, where Paracosm is going.

Eric Schles tells me that "slavery is the most extreme version of income inequality" and how he is using technology to end it.

Details

Who he is, how he became interested in human trafficking; Manhattan district attorney, technological deficiencies, Eric introduced databases, predictions not allowed; Demand Abolition, factors leading to trafficking, changing policies to fight trafficking; types of data analysis and how it helps, where the data comes from, scanning multiple sources, cross referencing with homeless databases; languages and technologies used; in DA office what comes first - the case or the data, once a case is closed the data is sealed; some of Eric's successes, reduced workload on DA, saving a woman from slavery; how you can help.

Ken Finnegan, chief technologist of the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland tells me about what Ireland has to offer the tech industry.

Details

Who he is, what the Industrial Development Agency does, sales and marketing for Ireland; why should companies invest in Ireland, 1,200 foreign companies, favorable tax rate, high education level; proximity to European cities, technology backpackers; university incubators, Nova startup incubation at UCD; successful Irish tech companies, Decawave smallest location sensor, S3 Group smallest analog to digital converter; Web Summit; access to venture capital in Ireland; IoT in Ireland - a "technological horizontal", sensors, communications networks, cloud storage, analysis and deriving value from the data; what happens to Ireland in the next recession, dot-com bust hit hard, lessons learned - investing in fundamental research and commercialization of products, heavy investment for foreign companies and harder to walk away from; Ken invites you to visit.

Lisa Nielsen and Daniel Kador of Keen IO tell about their approach to business, decision making, managers and building software.

Details

Who they are; what Keen IO does, types of analytics; type of organization, going their own way, hiring and firing, voting, holacracy; ideas that didn't work and the response from staff; developing people, coaching program, who trains the coaches, non violent communication training, sharing with the community; specific hiring criteria; no bosses, self directed employees, trusting your employees, feedback without managers, conflict mediation, the most talkative engineers I've heard of, group therapy in the weekly "anxious, excited", changing teams; the Keen.io operating system; removing a person from a team.

Scott Allen, author, Pluralsight author, podcast host and consultant tells me all about the upcoming release of ASP.NET 5.

Details

Who he is; is ASP.NET 5 a rewrite; lightweight, better for SPAs; Scott's favorite new features ; don't need vs 2015, works on Linux; more modular; cross platform, core (subset) CLR; lighter on resources; inbuilt dependency injection; new configuration system; middleware, its history and how it differs from handlers and filter, middleware sees more; combining MVC and Web API; tag helpers; web forms are gone; is Microsoft providing better documentation and examples; front-end improvements, angular, bootstrap, Grunt, Gulp, Bower.

Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft talks to me about the private cloud and why it has failed.

Details

Definition of private cloud, virtualized data centers, getting value from the cloud; enterprise scale, web scale and hyper scale; differences between private and public cloud, daytime and nighttime workloads; cultural change is needed when adopting cloud; same software problem, different decade; companies expected cost reduction, but didn't get it; vertical scale doesn't work anymore, start small in cloud and grow; we got it wrong so often why would you expect anything different now; current state of private cloud; private cloud is failing; bringing in the skills to deploy private cloud, need exec buy-in; how to get buy-in; agility, complexity and cost example of success at Lowe's; wrap up.

Andrei Simionescu of the now closed Lavaboom talks to me about the encrypted email service they wanted to make.

Details

Who he is; a little about Lavaboom; PGP is unfriendly, why did they make it, connection to Lavabit; "but I've got nothing to hide", do I make myself a target by using it; other PGP email initiatives; lawful legal requests; open source for core features, verifying the builds are from the source; how Lavaboom works; is there any clear text ever; losing a password; what kind of encryption is in use; open source problems; hosting; scaling; making money; raising money.

Nicholas Blumhardt discusses Seq, Serilog and structured event logging with me.

Details

Who he is, what is serilog, Event Tracking for Windows (ETW) and Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB), structured event streams, no more regex; finding events in your log, navigating from one type of event to another; what feedback he gets; datastore; seq, use cases, filtering by type; seq data storage, Microsoft Extensible Storage Engine; making money; releases and new versions; simple install and usage instructions.

Trevor Stricker of Disco Pixel tells me all about indie game development.

Details

Who he is and what he does; what is an indie game developer; skills needed to be an indie dev; protecting your work; platforms to develop on, naming your child Unity, learning about Unity, technical limitations; importance of partnerships as a game developer, corporate and developer partnerships; learning non games skills to scale your game; making money; book recommendations, Creativity, Inc.

Justin Mills, software engineer at Yesware tells me about their flat organizational structure and development practices.

Details

Little about Justin and Yesware; team structure, no test team, no defined team leads; no cohesive architecture; shared infrastructure, hierarchy might be needed; getting approval to reduce technical debt; assigning teams to tasks, trying open allocation, ending open allocation; no titles in engineering but other departments have titles; no one in a position to make a tough decision; struggling with agile, speed of development is the goal.
**extended interview** SDLC, frequent releases probably break often,
Justin's hopes for the company's future.

Eliot Knudsen, field engineer at Tamr talks to me about their machine learning tool and a new way of examining data.

Details

Who he is and what he does; what is Tamr; working with data sources, the traditional way, the Tamr way, machine learning combined with human guidance;data quality and foreign languages; Thompson Reuters example, curating data, increasing speed; deploying Tamr; how Tamr works, db, java, web client; competitors; future work.

Jason MacInnes, CTO of Draft Kings tells me about their architecture and scaling demands.

Details

A little aabout Jason; what Draft Kings is, why it's not gambling, how Draft Kings started; controlling growth, SDLC, Agile growing pains, aligning skills; software stack (MySql, RabbitMq, MassTransit), choice of ASP.NET; scaling the system; transitioning to micro-services, dev ops; service level agreements, dealing with unpredictable events; where the statistics and data come from, customer privacy, future work.

Boston was host to the first ever Open Data Science Conference over the weekend of May 30th and 31st 2015. I spent the days wandering around talking to people with interesting stories. I hope you enjoy this episode, it was fun making it. My next podcast will be back to the normal interview format.

Andrew and Bobby Brennan, and I discuss Lucybot and why good API design and documentation lead to good developer experience.

Details

Who they are; what Lucybot is, more than simple documentation; API economy, easier to work with is more important; easier to use API wins with developers; good vs bad API, good documentation, sandbox, example code; what Lucybot does, auto doc generation, auto code generation, machine readable API description, swagger; client libraries, auto generation; APIs for now developers, API recipes; other tools, swagger and alpaca; future work, repository for APIs, on premises deployment.

Eric Bloom of Manger Mechanics and I discussing how to get promoted in IT and what to expect as a manager.

Details

Who he is, new book, a productivity cocktail; getting promoted, what got you here won't get you there, staying or going, accidental managers, management is a skill; what if you don't want to manage; advice on getting promoted, get management experience outside the office, nepotism in companies; what changes when promoted, Manager Mechanics; leading without authority, difficult team members, people are for themselves not against you; common problems new managers face; learning to delegate; politics; professional friends come and go enemies accumulate; dealing with superiors, your manager and your manger's manger; you always have a boss; mangers live in fish bowls.

Deb Biggar of Boston Human Factors and I discuss what UX is and why it is important.

Details

Who she is; a story of why is UX important; what is UX, disciplines in UX - experience design, interaction design, information architect, user researcher, UX unicorns; phases of UX work - concept, design, prototype, validate, implement; what if a company can't afford UX; should you copy from big companies; relationship between UX and front-end, nitpicking and deadlines; agile or fragile, UX stays sprints ahead; books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Deb's UX play book.

Peter Welch, code monkey, blogger and author, and I talk about the software industry and the people in it.

Details

Peter's background; his books; programming sucks, problems in the interview process; utilitarian programming; complexity in software; how bad are things in the industry, business doesn't understand complexity; Bryan rants about C level people in companies, Peter tells a story about restaurants, whose job is it to ensure quality work is done, over engineering; respect for engineers; are great engineers dangerous, arrogant engineers are worse; politics - taking part of avoiding; "everything is broken because there's no good code and everybody's just trying to keep it running", HeartBleed, is the "sophisticated hack" a fair excuse, hard for old businesses to move to new tech; standards and practices; "all programmers....are slowly going mad", how do we make programming better, Peter is an optimist!; complexity.

Jeff Glennon of Software Delivery Labs and I talk about how to improve the software delivery process.

Details

Jeff's background and company, what is software delivery vs project management; getting all teams working together, deathmarch towards a release date; blame always lands on engineering; other problems, forcing new processes on teams, disputes, transparency is the best approach; power and politics, no silver bullet; how to improve the process, responsibility without blame; agile seems to be the only choice, what if the client doesn't want scrum; end to end example, miscommunication, delays, finger pointing, lost money, get to prototype and fire 'em all; when is your work done; outsource mentoring.

Bob Familiar and I discuss how to bring the principles of lean engineering to the enterprise.

Details

About Bob and BlueMetal Inc; time at Microsoft; what is lean engineering, origins, just in time, small batches, failing fast, continuous improvement, applicability to software; batching and automation of the software process, continuous delivery, failing fast "common sense is hard to come by"; over lap with dev ops; build, measure and learn; principle of lean - "seeing the whole" vs "deciding as late as possible", comparison with Agile; leveraging cloud as part of lean; bring lean to large enterprises; changing behaviour instead of thinking, change in small steps, easier for an external party to bring change; patterns, micro-service architecture, deployment pipeline pattern, strangler pattern.

Igor Moochnick of Constant Contact and I discuss dev ops, deployment pipelines and other architectural concerns.

Details

What Constant Contact does, Igor's role; what is dev ops, moving towards dev ops, provisioning servers, changes to dev cycles; from code to production deployment, source control, tracking code/sql and deployment pipelines; human intervention in the process; how the process changes have helped; reverting a deployment of an app, reverting a database, evolutionary databases; Jenkins CI, pipeline generator; architectural changes needed, decoupling release cycles of teams, SoA, microservices, shared libraries; enforcing rules, resistance to change, training dev teams to be independent; role of release engineering team; adoption of dev ops will be driven by commercial needs.

Todd Gardner tells me about Track:js, a JavaScript error tracking tool and how to get a three month free trial.

Details

Todd and I discuss his background; what is Track:js, client side errors, stack trace; when to use Track:js in the life-cycle of an app, challenges of production JavaScript apps; installing and using Track:js, turning it on and off for periods or for particular browsers; overhead of Track:js, duck punching and monkey patching; Track:js is for developers, not for marketing analytics; who uses Track:js, high end developers, value per customer; building a scalable system and gathering the data, 120 errors a second reported, hosting in Azure, throttling, elastic search; choosing a cloud platform, BizSpark support, Digital Ocean, Amazon, self hosting, OVH; security issues with data being tracked, what is and is not tracked; local installs of Track:js; monatizing Track:js, subscription tiers; Azure queueing strategy; future development of Track:js, convergence of Angular, Ember and React; how to get a three month free trial.

Henry Cipolla of Localytics and I discuss analytics, its real time uses and how Localytics tools work.

Details

Henry's background, what Localytics does; SDK; analytics and app marketing; recording user behavior; how customers use data from Localytics; figuring out what customers do and want; acting on data; competitors; how it works, AWS, real time processing, Scala, Angular, Mongo, Hadoop, Redshift; growing the system; incorporating third party tools and figuring out how to remove them, moving large volumes of data; scaling; tracking users and privacy; advice on using big data, queues, store all data, tagging; misunderstanding the cloud.

Gus Warren of Disconnect discusses their tools, privacy, tracking and acceptable advertising.

Details

Gus’ background, what is Disconnect; how ads track us, cookies, fingerprinting; why is the information gathered, tying online behavior to offline identities; privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide, incognito/private browser mode is not enough; what Disconnect does, blocking, search, ratings, not an ad blocker, differences from Ghostery, targeted, but private advertising; getting people to opt-in to advertising; how the tech works, data usage reduction, faster page loads, private searching; Google pulling Disconnect mobile from app store, side loading; free and premium editions; advertising industry response to blocking tools, future of tracking, EFF Do Not Track policy; spreading word about Disconnect; partnerships, Black Phone; building a browser; future work.

Michael O Church and I discuss whether software engineers have become the manual laborers of the 21st century, open allocation, agile development and how companies could be better.

Details

Michael’s background; being an engineer vs a manager; poor perception of engineers, value of engineers, makers vs takers, engineers as a commodity; not everyone with an MBA is a bad person; engineers are the manual laborers of the 21st century, craziness of interview processes; continuing low status after staring a job, getting credit for work done; open allocation solves many problems, better work, better rewards, happier engineers, language choices, learning new code is harder than learning a new language; agile in an open allocation company, agile as micromanagement, scrum masters, lords and knights, sprints; what Michael’s company would be, constrained open allocation, small, profit sharing; how companies can improve, become engineer driven, engineers should engage more with business, understand convexity; understanding company politics; hard to challenge bad ideas, open allocation helps; arrogance is rewarded; engineers are not always the best at communication or accepting criticism, engineers should learn to fight for themselves; reading broadly, book recommendations, Breaking Bad executions and map reduce.

Jason Haley talks about the good, bad and ugly of life as a software consultant.

Details

Background, why go independent, working and hustling; getting the first customer; liability and setting up a company, being self employed vs an entrepreneur , get a lawyer and an accountant, networking, business bank account, branding, contractor vs consultant, confidence in presenting yourself; getting paid, income as a consultant, long dry spells, have multiple clients, saying no to a client, fitting with a client; judging what you can deliver, best clients understand software; being a generalist vs a specialist, finding a niche; picking a rate, factoring in costs, charge what you deserve, keep a rainy day fund, watch expenses; support network, billable hour trap, taking advice; managing the client relationship; pick a good company name, importance of referrals, don’t negotiate a rate, don’t keep a bad client; review if consulting is for you after a while.

Robert Hurlbut and I discuss various aspects of software security.

Details

Background, why security isn’t thought about enough, out of the box security with MVC, XSS, CSRF, model binding and parameter tampering; https everything or just on parts of a site; Microsoft improving security, open source issues, inclusion of open source in hardware security devices; unmanaged code in web apps; typical weaknesses in software, password security; software review process, threat models, code reviews, fuzz testing; healthcare security, medical devices, attack vectors, Barnaby Jack, how to build secure devices; finding good security professionals, conferences and tradeshows; books; dont roll your own security; Robert’s presentation at Boston Code Camp.

Dennis Mortensen and I discuss x.ai, an AI personal assistant for scheduling meetings.

Details

Dennis and I discuss his background, traditional analytics products, predictive analytics; x.ai, it “schedules meetings”, how it works, invisible software, people don’t have control panels or sliders, tuning Amy multiple calendars; humanizing Amy, pain does not have a syntax, democratizing having a personal assistant; scheduling nirvana, Amy work with Emily, elastic calendar; human speed; psychology of Amy, Amy is not an “it” and does not have features, Amy has skills and receives education; invisible interface; accepting Amy and stigma around AI PAs; is Amy dehumanizing, or is a control panel dehumanizing; why now for Amy, 1019 meetings and 672 reschedules in one year, not Turing ready; no app, maybe location awareness; audience of 87 million US knowledge workers, spreading word; when it will be available, thousands of users, tens of thousands meetings a day; backend, improving understanding, context; Amy’s truth, cultural differences, irony; architecture, no scaling problem, AWS, Scala, mongo; data and privacy; future of x.ai, flights, hotels, other languages, voice integration.

Linus Olsson of the Hemlis project discusses what Hemlis is, why they are building it and how it works.

Details

Linus I and discuss his background, what is Hemlis, why build it; open source; need for security and privacy, does encryption make you a target, good encryption vs bad encryption; why trust Hemlis, legal requests for data, would he go to jail to protect users; how it works, public key encryption, easier than PGP, type of encryption, back door on phone, base band hacking; open source vulnerabilities; servers, just for relaying, graphs, peer-to-peer not viable; scaling; release date, usability; how to promote your software; pricing, premium features, enterprise solution.

Piero Toffanin is a software engineer and user experience designer who left his job this year to travel around North America, coding as he goes.

Details

Why give up the day job, inspired by Live on the Margin, preparation to travel, selling stuff and buying necessities, camper van vs hostels/hotels; practicalities of working on the road, charging laptops, getting internet, working offline; finding work, referrals; where Piero has travelled; splitting the day between work and adventure; compromises in the wandering life, meeting other travellers; remote working; how long will he keep going; challenges on the road; books choices and how to perform a tracheotomy.

Christopher Marston is the founder and CEO of Exemplar Companies, Inc, we discuss the legal aspects of going out as a consultant and getting a startup running.

Details

Christopher and I discuss what Exemplar Law does, fixed pricing; going out as a consultant, protecting against personal liability, LLC’s, SCorp, CCorp; startups, vesting, roles and responsibilities; equity in startups, dilution, removing a member of the team; protecting intellectual property while promoting yourself; patents vs trade secret; raising capital, business plans and other paperwork; growth of venture capital firms in Boston; shutting down a startup, common reasons for failure, under-capitalization, founder disputes, lawsuits; closing down a business.

Part two of my two part conversation with Sean Blanchfield of Page Fair.

Details

Sean and I discuss how adblockers work, easylist block list, how Page Fair works, cooperation with easy list, using Page Fair on a site; backend technology, python, Redis, twisted, Linux, Amazon Web Services, server load and traffic patterns; serving ads, bids, speed, Page Fair auction, no tracking of users, panopticlick and fingerprinting, tracking across devices and locations, data management platforms; noscript and Page Fair; Youtube and ads; not always showing an ad; ad block walls; book choices, The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Elements of Style, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Thinking, Fast and Slow; social networking and playing on expectations, trust in relationships, meeting customers.

Part one of my two part conversation with Sean Blanchfield of Page Fair.

Details

Sean and I discuss his past at Demonware, multiplayer networking layer; Scalefront startup incubator, cycling through startup ideas; Page Fair beginnings; innovation life cycle, finding the good idea, determining the size of the market, Sean and I are old!; Destructoid and going viral during a bachelor party(!), popularity of adblockers, popularity by site type, by age; YouTube preroll ads and the spread of blocking, Google ads white listed; non intrusive ads, Page Fair ads can be turned off, click through rates, discrete ads; better ads from Page Fair, competition; The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive technology, big companies can’t change, culture in companies; ad blocking on mobile, FireFox on Android supports adblock, adblock browsers are on the way, Adblock Plus app removed from App Store, Disconnect tracker and ad blocking for mobile and desktop; supporting free content through ads, publishers reaction to ad blockers.

Part two goes into the technical workings of Page Fair.

Discussion with Alex Robbio and Silvana Gaia of Belatrix Software about outsourcing software development.

Details

Who they are, what they do, and what the company does, why they focus on software product development and qa; outsourcing vs offshoring, nearshoring; choosing an outsourcing partner, location, type of project, technology, collaboration; skills of devs in outsourced team; contract termination; size of team; scrum in an outsourced project, personal contact with client; cultural differences; team turnover, project governance, customer control over devs on project, better to be a big customer of an outsourcer; advantages of having multiple teams on a project; costs and benefits of visits; managing projects, planning; handling client complaints, catch early, provide training, improve communications, retrospective; customer buy in; customers who just want a job done; setting customer expectations, culture; customers moving away from far away outsourcing; global shortage of IT talent, training; breaking rocks vs building cathedrals.

Grant Fritchey and I discuss database dev op and how it can anything to anyone.

Details

what he does; origin of scary DBA nickname; what is dev ops, day to day dev ops tasks; DBA and developer interactions, communications, DBA’s favorite word is “no”; dev ops and source control, putting a DB in source control, integration with dev, auditing; moving DB from production to source control, ssdt, red gate sql source control, DBA resistance to source control, changing methodologies and mindsets, teething pains; tooling; keeping DB source in same place as software source, merges; benefits of source control, auditing, legislative requirements, tight coupling with dev, versioning, commenting, labeling a version; shared dev DB server vs individual dev DB server; comparing production to source control; continuous integration and automated deployment, complete replace of DB vs incremental builds, breaking changes; maturity of tools for CI, automated testing, app code vs TSQL for testing, testing before check in; replication and automated deployment; Entity Framework Migrations, breaking changes, EF Migrations vs SSDT and Red Gate SQL Source Control, up and down migrations*; ORMs, dbas don’t like ORMs, performance, Glimpse to assess executed SQL; book choice – The Phoenix Projec, a parable on dev ops and making teams work together; Grant is presenting at the PASS summit full day seminar on query tuning, Grant’s book SQL Server Query Performance Tuning coming in Sept, wearing rainbow fuzzies for Argenis Without Borders.

Designer Brian O'Neill tells me what it takes to make a well designed piece of software.

Details

who he is and what he does; role as a designer vs developer; how to find out what is needed, getting feedback, including engineers in feedback process; what is great design, invisible interface, task flow, google as an example of good design, good task flow example, db tables should not dictate the view; who is responsible for good design; bridging the gap between designers and developers, learning design; steps in making a good design from the perspective of a designer and an engineer, laddering, sketch on whiteboards rather than using fancy software, user testing; why not to start from the data model; flexibility vs usability; engineers should be involved in user testing, self reflection; agile, incrementing rather than iterating, lack of user representative is common, design runway – designers stay ahead of engineers by a sprint, validation loops, don’t worry about what people like about an interface only what they do; definitions of success from different perspectives; working as an insider rather than as an external contractor; conflicts between engineers and designers, justifying decision making and intuition, sum of design errors reflect on overall product, building respect between engineers and designers; just because the big boys do it doesn’t mean you should; Brian’s music; author recommendations, Edward Tufte, Stephen Few.

Rebecca O'Dette of RunKeeper talks to me about their Agile development process.

Details

We cover Rebecca's role, company growth over the past few years, development structure, introduction of agile processes, moving from waterfall, choice of scrum over other agile options, first steps in agile, team size, current team structure, changes over past few years, scaling and syncing teams, scrum of scrums, QA and release processes, release bottlenecks, release cycles, missing Microsoft project, agile for marketing, support, business development and user experience, kanban, story points, planning poker, complexity and

Part 2 of my discussion with Nicolas Dorier in which we discuss NBitcoin.

Details

what it is and why Nicolas wrote it, features of NBitcoin, how to contribute; other development work, bitcoin as a payment mechanism for consultants;
colored coins as a way of replacing shares for funding companies, dividends and distribution of profit, dilution of investment; regulation, taxation, legal backlash, fiat money.
Nicolas’ Codeproject contributions, .NET Micro Framework for use in a car, Gadgeteer project, Gadgeteer vs Netduino; 11 Useful Classes; Nicolas’ book choice.

Part one of my two part conversation with Nicolas Dorier on bitcoin and NBitcoin.

Details

what a bitcoin is; why Nicolas became interested in bitcoin; decentralized currency; distributed ledger; escrow; mining, variance problem, computing power needed, mining pools, democracy, 51% problem, changing rules; mining as way of making money; commission on payments, loss of value of bitcoin; storage of bitcoins, MtGox, cold wallets; bitcoin for subscription services; scalability, transaction processing limitations and solutions, memory requirements of block chain and loss of decentralization; anonymity; more on the 51% problem, distributed decision making, voting, 51% attack – cancelling blocks of miners, code changes; hard limit on number of bitcoins, decreasing speed of mining; hoarding of bitcoins and deflationary currencies, Friedman vs Keynes.

Gary Marcos tells about the differences between mobile app and website development.

Details

Why build a mobile app instead of a web site designed for mobile, usability, approaches to app development for teams with no experience in app development – near shore vs offshore, costs of app development, launching into a store, maintaining an app, crash analytics, post launch issues, redeploying your app, platform to build your first app on, supporting Android devices, Windows and Blackberry, promoting your app, app analytics, mobile retargeting, ratings and feedback.

Bill Wilder, Microsoft Azure MVP tells me about the Azure plaform.

Details

Differences from traditional development, reliable queues, automation and devops, security, cloud computing vs alternatives, green data centres, scaling, test and deployment, costs and licensing, Azure over the past four years, active directory, SQL services, growth of services – mobile services, hadoop, caching, media services, BizTalk, DNS, virtual networks, Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie, Bill and Azure, Global Windows Azure Bootcamp, commercial usage of Azure vs AWS, book choices.

Wide ranging discussion with Bob Downey of Galen Healthcare about software development practices.

Details

Who his, what he does. Architecture, book theory vs practical considerations, refactoring in a business environment, how software grows, development and collaboration across multiple offices, promotion in development groups, decision making, technology choices, cloud platforms, keeping up with current frameworks, refactoring, reusability, testing, SpecFlow.

Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar tell me about the amazing Glimpse project.

Details

We chat about the origins of Glimpse, what it does, how it works and where it is going.