2 Devs from Down Under

With Google+ coming out the other week, and ColdFusion developers jumping on it like crazy, we thought we would have a chat with Elliott Sprehn, who used to be a ColdFusion developer for Teratech, but has more recently been working in the Mountain View office of Google.

Elliott was part of the team that worked on the super-funky send feedback feature that can be found in the bottom right hand corner of Google+, as well as in a few other Google properties, like YouTube.

We announce that ColdFusion now has a new product manager - Rakshith N, which is wonderful news! Rakshith has been with the ColdFusion engineering team for a number of years, and has now stepped up to be the product manager. Congratulations Rakshith!

From there we go into a discussion of unit testing with Javascript (this will change the way you write Javascript!), and some of Elliot's favourite frameworks for doing unit testing with Javascript - Javascript Test Driver and Jasmine.

Finally we talk about an incredibly powerful, although not very well known, MVC and Dependency Injection (and SO much more), framework for client side Javascript that Elliott has been involved with - called AngularJS (there is even a quote from Ray Camden on the website), talk about some of it's features and how it does the magic that it does.

Resources:

Elliott on Twitter

Elliott on Google+

Events:

Edge of the Web - 28th & 29th of July 2011

cf.Objective(ANZ) announces dates, and the an additional Flex Track

Jobs:

NZ Herald / APN Online - Coldfusion Developer

After being gone for a little while, we are back with our ninth episode!

After discussing Mark's new dog, Sukie, and how he's now also addicted to turntable.fm (as I'm sure Kai will soon be as well) we get into some deeper discussion of more relevant topics, such as how Ray Camden has joined Adobe (Yay!), and how Adobe has dropped support for Linux (Boo!).

From there we get into an in-depth discussion about A/B Testing (a.k.a Multi-Variant Testing). Including what it is, why you would want to use multi variant testing, what tools are currently available for doing multi variant testing, and what makes some better than others, from aspects such as capabilities as well as testing and deployment.

Mark then announces a new Open Source project, Squabble, which is a service side Multi-Variant suite that is written in ColdFusion that he has been working on with Ezra Parker and Josh Wines, that helps combat some of the issues that they have faced using some other multi variant testing tools out there.

Resources:

Goodbye, Google

Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap

Google Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer

Optimizely

Events:

Sydney Adobe Platform User Group - ColdFusion Builder 2

Wellington Creative Suite User Group - Adobe Camera Raw

Mark recently got back from the amazing cf.Objective() conference in the US.

We discuss the content that was part of the keynotes, as well as the new features that were revealed about the next version of ColdFusion - including the revelation that the next version of ColdFusion is coming sooner than expected...

We then go through some of Mark's favourite sessions, including, but limited to:

Undocumented and Off Script: ColdFusion & Ehcache

ORM Zen

Implementing an In-Memory Distributed Cache Using ColdSpring AOP and Ehcache

Advanced Web Application Security

Test Driven Development in JavaScript with JsTD and Jasmine

What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?)

Intro to AngularJS, JavaScript Done Right

Resources:

cf.Obective() Keynote Recording

Events:

Adobe Creative Camp New Zealand 2011

This week ColdFusion Builder 2 was released, along with Creative Suite 5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5. We have a chat about Builder 2 and the features we like in it, and also talk through some functionality we would like to see in the product as well.

We also have a talk about price discrepancies between the U.S.A and Australia and New Zealand, and why that may be.

Mark also received his Samsung Tab 10.1v, so a discussion about Android Tablets ensues.

We also do a quick shout out to the streaming radio station CodeBass, and the guys and gals who wrote the MediaSlurp player for listening to Adobe related audio and video content.

A few other topics pop up as well, but a pretty straight forward episode this week!

Jobs:

Daemon - Web Developer (Sydney)

Cupidmedia - Intermediate CF Developer (Gold Coast)

Events:

May 24 - CS 5.5 launch in Wellington - Flash Platforum User Group and Creative Suite User Group

Late May early June - ANZ Adobe CS 5.5 Roadshow

What an amazing podcast!

We were very privileged to have a panel of incredible people with us today to talk about Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD).

A huge thanks to Bill Shelton, Marc Esher, Michael Labriola and Sandy Mamoli for agreeing to join us, and participating in one of the most interesting, and thought provoking discussions on Agile process and Test Driven Development I've every been a party to.

We discuss testing from a variety of angles, why is it good, what are good ways to implement it, automation, how it factors into your process, as well as talking about the Agile process in general, how it can fit into certain organisations and business structures, and what problems its attempting to solve.

Brace yourselves for some good-to-honest learnin'!

Below are the resources we discussed in the podcast.

MxUnit

FlexUnit

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

Google Testing Blog

GreenHopper

We're back again!

Starting off this conversation, we discuss Mark's (and probably soon Kai's) addiction to Spiral Knights, which is an incredibly simple and fun Diablo style freemium cross platform MMO (Friend Mark as 'Neurotic', if you play too).

Kai takes us through his experience at WebDU this year, and talks about how much he enjoyed the conference. We have a good discussion about his presentation on developing for mobile platforms, ranging from phones to tablets, and the pros and cons to different approaches.

The Amazon outage (which is still ongoing) becomes an interesting topic, and diverges into discussion about decentralised version control (i.e. what happens when your source control repo is stored on a server that goes down).

Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP comes up as well, and we have a good chat about the Flex ecosystem, and IDE's in general, along with the discussion of an interesting e-week article.

Finally, we announce a ColdFusion Job in Melbourne, and the CS5.5 Asia Pacific Roadshow.

Another long episode! We have a long and winding discussion about running and developing for ColdFusion on platforms other than Windows - generally speaking, Linux (Ubuntu, Mark) and Mac (Kai), which takes us well into how we set up our local development environments. Details like how we use virtual machines, what Eclipse plugins we use, version control clients and the like are talked about as well.

Late to the party, we have a talk about the ol' cfscript vs cftag debate, and how we feel about how people can format their code. Surprisingly no fireballs were thrown in this exchange, as usually this tends to provoke incredibly heated discussions!  As we all know, which line a { goes on, is very important stuff!

Lastly, we talk about the recent broo-ha-ha over whether or not open source developers should be taking donations (Spoiler: we tend to side on the "if you give stuff away for free, do what you like" camp).

And lastly, we put a call out for more people to comment on this site to our podcasts! We love the feedback and being able to interact with our audience, so please comment / send us any suggestions or questions that you have, we'd be happy to talk about them.

After a delay of about one week or 10 days due to Mark moving and me traveling around in Australia to see clients and to attend a course, here's episode 3 of your friendly neighbourhood podcast from Down Under. This was an epic recording of about 90 minutes length - here you go and have some fun for the weekend.

This time we have a special guest: Geoff Bowers - the man behind Sydney's awesome webDU conference and benevolent dictator of the Farcry CMS community. We talk to Geoff about webDU 2011 which is actually coming up quite soon (April 14/15 2011 in Sydney - go register as long as there are tickets left). From there we jump into all sorts of topics - one is Agile and how we use (or don't use) it. We talk about the ghost of Spectra (again), how and why Spectra failed and that some of Spectra's good ideas became part of Farcry CMS.

Another big topic today is the next version of ColdFusion. Adobe made a few of their ideas for "CF Next" public at SOTR 2011 earlier this month and we went into discussing a few of those features that are to be expected. ColdFusion Builder 2 is out there in public beta as well - and it gets a mention!

Finally there are a bunch of community announcement re the New Zealand CFUG, the next meeting of the Wellington Flash Platform User Group, some changes in the Melbourne Adobe community as well as the next Brisbane Flash Platform Group meeting in April. As a reminder to all of you involved with the Adobe community in Australia and New Zealand: we're more than happy to mention your event - you just need to let us know about it!

Another instalment from the 2 developers from Downunder.

Kai and I talk about a variety of topics, including the books Driving Technical Change, and the ColdFusion Anthology, detour into talking about Adam Lehman's appointment to being the Flash Builder product manager, Kai attending Webstock 2011 and among other things playing the game Werewolf, swerve into discussing software certifications, SOLR, ColdFusion Memory Leaks and local events (and some other stuff I can't think of right now).

There should be something in there for everyone!

This was always just meant to be an experiment. It was fun and we liked it (even though we recorded it at 6 a.m. in Mark's timezone) - here you go.

In this episode we're talking about cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010, what's going to happen with cf.Objective(ANZ) 2011, we're covering the big announcement of Adam and Allison passing over the stewardship of ColdFusion to a new team and speak about some other random things: What's Oracle doing to Java and why and why Kai thinks Mercurial lends itself much better to corporate, Windows-based development teams than Git.

Tell us if you like it and how you cope with our weird mishmash of accents - if you like us rambling on about stuff for about an hour every fortnight, we might take it on as a new hobby :)

Please note: 2 dudes from downunder is a "work in progess" - Any good suggestions welcome!

UPDATE: Title is sorted. We're now "2 devs from downunder"!