2 Devs from Down Under

2 Devs from Down Under

By Kai Koenig and Mark MandelTechnology
Download on the App Store

2 Devs from Down Under episodes

  • Episode 35 - Go(ing) to Go
    So, we're finally back. Episode 35 is all about Go and we're joined by Marc Esher (who was on the podcast before). 
    After some a quick run through some "things of today" (that Kai clearly won this time), we get started and try to explain what Go is and its place in the universe of programming languages. We ramble on talking about specific features of the language, what individuals like or dislike about it and how each of us uses Go. Towards the end, we're discussing package management issues with Go but then run out of time to dive into more details and a variety of other topics on our list.
    However, here's a good amount of links for further reading and on some of the stuff we didn't get to...

    Getting started:

    • Start: http://golang.org/
    • Go in-browser tour: http://tour.golang.org/#1
    • Intro to how to write go code: http://golang.org/doc/code.html 
    • Effective Go: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html
    • Go language spec (quite readable): http://golang.org/ref/spec
    • Some code to read: http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/12/27/code-to-read-when-learning-go/
    • List of Go projects: https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects#Frameworks_and_Toolkits
    • Cross-compilation with Go: http://dave.cheney.net/2012/09/08/an-introduction-to-cross-compilation-with-go

    Go Packages and Libraries:
    • http://godoc.org/
    • http://go-search.org
    • Web Framework: Martini
    • Testing: GoConvey
    • Package Management: GPM 
    • Generics: Gen 
    • URL routing: Mux 
    • Goon (GAE specific) 

    Community:
    • Go slack community: https://gophers.slack.com/
    • #go-nuts on Freenode (IRC)
    1 hr 16 min
  • Episode 34 - Much Belated
    So Kai was meant to put this episode up months and months ago, but he decided to go travelling instead and it has languished since then.

    So I'm going through the notes now and hopefully I managed to write down everything we talked about.

    Kai finished off the Data Mining with Weka MOOC recently, and talks about his experience.

    Mark recommends (probably yet again), the A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining online book.

    Mark realises he's an idiot when it came to immutability and Clojure, and ends up rewriting his library. See this ticket and this blog post for details.

    Mark was heading off to CampJS at the time (yep, it was that long ago we recorded this).

    Mark talks about Google App Engine (apparently I'm doing all the talking here). What specifically I talk about I can't remember.  From the notes it looks like Managed VMs and the Asia Pacific data centre.

    Kai tries to tie Heartbleed to ColdFusion. It's doesn't work.

    I think that about covers it!  I think I'm now going to listen to the podcast again, just so I can remember what we said.

    Oh yeah, I'm not unemployed any more, either.

    1 hr 15 min
  • Episode 33 - Stuff
    This recording was actually supposed to happen before the Holidays. But on the morning, Mark was turned into a domestic goddess for the day by his lovely wife, so we had to postpone.
    Episode 33 is about "stuff". Among other things we learn that Mark has no bloody idea of proper board gaming and that he thinks Articulate and Risk are good board games. They are not. 
    (i) Note to myself (Kai): There'll be a board game episode soon.(ii) Note to Diane, Amy, Mark and myself: We need to catchup either in Melbourne or Wellington and play some games.
    We talk a bit about Go and Core.Async and how to get started with Go and how to run Go on the Raspberry Pi. We also talk about TDD and BDD in CFML because Kai was playing with the new Testbox framework from the team behind Coldbox (Spoiler: It looks really, really good)
    Finally we also chatted about our conference calendar for the year:
    Kai:
    • Webstock 2014 (Wellington)
    • cf.Objective() (Minneapolis) (speaking)
    • Scotch on the Rocks (Edinburgh) (speaking)
    • Webinale or Int'l PHP conference (Berlin) (topics submitted)
    • Pycon AU (Brisbane)
    • CFCamp (Munich)
    Mark:
    • Lambda Jam AU
    • Strange Loop (St. Louis)





    1 hr 3 min
  • Episode 33 - Stuff
    This recording was actually supposed to happen before the Holidays. But on the morning, Mark was turned into a domestic goddess for the day by his lovely wife, so we had to postpone.
    Episode 33 is about "stuff". Among other things we learn that Mark has no bloody idea of proper board gaming and that he thinks Articulate and Risk are good board games. They are not. 
    (i) Note to myself (Kai): There'll be a board game episode soon.(ii) Note to Diane, Amy, Mark and myself: We need to catchup either in Melbourne or Wellington and play some games.
    We talk a bit about Go and Core.Async and how to get started with Go and how to run Go on the Raspberry Pi. We also talk about TDD and BDD in CFML because Kai was playing with the new Testbox framework from the team behind Coldbox (Spoiler: It looks really, really good)
    Finally we also chatted about our conference calendar for the year:
    Kai:
    • Webstock 2014 (Wellington)
  • cf.Objective() (Minneapolis) (speaking)
  • Scotch on the Rocks (Edinburgh) (speaking)
  • Webinale or Int'l PHP conference (Berlin) (topics submitted)
  • Pycon AU (Brisbane)
  • CFCamp (Munich)
    • Mark:
    • Lambda Jam AU
  • Strange Loop (St. Louis)
    • 1 hr 3 min
  • Episode 32 - Stuff we hack on
    This episode was about random stuff we're working on or playing with when not necessarily coding for money.
    Some (more or less) interesting stuff we came up with:
    • Xmonad - a window manager system for Linux: 
  • If Xmonad looks interesting to you - here's something similar for OS X: Slate 
  • Wordpress (Mark has a new blog...): https://github.com/markmandel/ansible_wordpress
  • Raygun.io CFML: https://github.com/TheRealAgentK/raygun4cfml
  • Mark's "Skype-replacement-that-will-rule-all-chats" based on Clojure, Clojurescript, AngularJS, Elastic Search and some other bits and pieces...
  • Good AngularJS book: http://www.packtpub.com/angularjs-web-application-development/book
  • Kai's trying to integrate his Phillips Hue lights with a Raspberry Pi via Python
  • AirPi, the weather station kit Kai's waiting for to arrive.
  • KiwiJS - a JS-based game engine for 2D-platform jump&run&shoot games: http://www.kiwijs.org 
  • Here's the very interesting talk Mark mentioned about reactive programming.
    • Finally, vote for cf.Objective() 2014 topics: 
    https://trello.com/b/4M6JSoyL/cf-objective-call-for-speakers-2014
    1 hr 14 min
  • Episode 31 - The 2DDU Technology Radar
    G'day, it's been a while.


    Today's episode features our first 2DDU Technology Radar. Oi? What?


    The guys at Thoughtworks have recently gained a lot of well-deserved fame for doing their Technology Radar. It's essentially a structured list of "stuff" to use, look at, evaluate or be careful with when it comes to technology. It contains everything from processes via platforms and tools up to specific technologies and languages.


    Here's our personal view on technologies: the 2DDU Technology Radar. It's a long episode, nearly 1 hour and 50 minutes. Feel free to agree or disagree with our views in the comments, discussion is very appreciated.


    If you want to look at the list of technologies we're talking about while listening to the episode you're very welcome to use our published Google Doc to do so. Have fun!
    1 hr 47 min
  • Episode 31 - The 2DDU Technology Radar
    G'day, it's been a while.
    Today's episode features our first 2DDU Technology Radar. Oi? What?
    The guys at Thoughtworks have recently gained a lot of well-deserved fame for doing their Technology Radar. It's essentially a structured list of "stuff" to use, look at, evaluate or be careful with when it comes to technology. It contains everything from processes via platforms and tools up to specific technologies and languages.
    Here's our personal view on technologies: the 2DDU Technology Radar. It's a long episode, nearly 1 hour and 50 minutes. Feel free to agree or disagree with our views in the comments, discussion is very appreciated.
    If you want to look at the list of technologies we're talking about while listening to the episode you're very welcome to use our published Google Doc to do so. Have fun!
    1 hr 49 min
  • Episode 30 - Broken Code, Rayguns, Enterprise Software and an Ark
    Today we've been joined by John-Daniel Trask, one of Kai's Wellington-based friends who's also the co-founder of both Mindscape and Raygun.io.
    Kai admitted that Mark clearly won "thing of the day" this time, but he's already planning his come back from that loss for episode 31 in about two weeks.
    After this unavoidable business of the day we start talking to JD about Raygun.io, a cloud-based service to track unhandled errors in your software. It's a very interesting product that stands out from the competition (according to Mark's 3-minute market research) by supporting a variety of different technologies as well as looking pretty.
    The latter triggered a brief interesting discussion on the importance of the user interface, the Novopay debacle in NZ and how enterprise software (the likes of Oracle Forms, Adobe Lifecycle, Microsoft Sharepoint etc) now jump on the HTML5 bandwagon and what we'd expect to happen with that.
    JD explains the tech stack Raygun.io has been built upon and it's interesting to see that they've used Mono on an AWS infrastructure for the core parts of the backend. While we're talking about AWS, Kai jumps to Glacier and his experience of backing up into Glacier using a Mac OS X tool called Arq.
    The unavoidable Mercurial topic comes up again as well - Kai's got a Mercurial column in Tweet Deck now that's actively being monitored and JD chimes in that he used to use Mercurial a lot in the past because of the lack of good Git tooling on Windows, too. However in the last 12 months that has changed, in particular because of Github providing a lot of good services (if one is willing to still use the command-line). Side note: Atlassian's SourceTree is available on Windows now, too - only supporting Git (and not Mercurial) at this stage though.
    1 hr 8 min
  • Episode 29 - Back from the Summer
    After nearly 4 months of "summer break" (yeah, right), we're back.
    We actually managed to talk about a few really interesting things:
    • Conferences we attended this year (Mark: RubyConf AU, Kai: Webstock) and conferences either or both of us plan to attend. The latter is a rather long: PyCon AU, cfObjective, D2Wc, Strangeloop, CFCamp, Lambda Jam Brisbane and YOW! Melbourne.
    • Distributed Version Control - what's the future of Mercurial (looking at the vast success of Git) and what are the options to host Mercurial in-house after Kiln on premise doesn't seem to be actively sold anymore to new clients
    • IntelliJ 12.1 is out - what's new and which plugins have we experienced to work well/not that well yet?
    • Ruby/JRuby vs. Python/Jython - what's the story with some languages being very popular on the JVM and others not so much?
    • Some CFML-related news: Railo 4.1 beta is out there (and looks great), CF 10 is available on Amazon AWS (finally) and Adobe CF 11 alpha is coming soon.
    • Error tracking with Raygun.io and Mark's efforts in OpenGL and LWJGL.
      • Here are some more links:
      • Clojure Workshop before Lamba Jam in Brisbane
      • The "surprise" link for Bootstrap users (listen to the podcast first)
      • Kai's CFML provider for the Raygun.io error tracking system
        • If all goes according to plan we're back in two weeks. Have a great weekend!
        52 min
      • Episode 28 - Our take on the decline of CFML
        So we're taking on a pretty controversial topic, but one that has been talked about a lot in the blog-o-sphere, and something we have touched on tangentially in the past.
        Here is the list of articles we discuss during the podcast:
        • CFML 2012: State of the Platform
        • State of ColdFusion Platform in 2012
        • CFML - Too Little, Too Late?
        • Sean said that Nick said that Fusion Authority said...
        • Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress
        • Thoughts on "Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress" by Stofke on wheels
        • The Last cf.Objective(ANZ)
          • We talk about our perception of the decline of CFML, specifically in Australia and globally, as well as thoughts on whether or not CFML as a whole can pull out of it, what we think the major CFML backers can do about it, and what we think you should be thinking about as a developer in the CFML community.
          We expect this to invoke some differing opinions - so while we welcome the discourse, please remember to be civil.
          1 hr 14 min

        About 2 Devs from Down Under

        From the publisher's feed

        Thoughts on all kinds of software development in a variety of programming languages by Mark Mandel and Kai Koenig - including an antipodean twist