Herding Code

Episode 210

While at NDC Oslo, K Scott and Jon talked to Ian Cooper about Microservices and using the Brighter library for Command Dispatcher / Command Processor patterns.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 210: Ian Cooper on Microservices and the Brighter library

Show Notes:

• Why Microservices?
  • (0:48) Ian explains that "micro" doesn't imply number of lines of code but "A bounded concept/business capability within your Domain" (put forth by Martin Fowler and James Lewis)
  • (1:20) Ian talks about breaking the domain problem down further and further for simpler testing, better fault tolerance and incremental releases.
  • (2:20) "If you can't QA everything you need to be able to monitor and respond to issues rapidly."
  • (2:42) Scott Allen asks if Devops is a driver for Microservices rather than physical deployment or team size.
  • (3:00) Ian talks about the scale limits of developers and teams and how component based architectures.
• Have we been here before?
  • (4:00) Ian talks about how Microservices is the next generation of component-based architectures after DCOM, CORBA, SOA and the importance of understanding what worked, what didn't and why.
  • (4:49) Asking a component for a cup of tea vs telling something how to make tea highlighting the difference between Microservices vs RPC. RPC was very coupled to behavior which lead to fragile APIs.
• Finding the "micro" sweet spot
  • (5:50) Jon asks how you manage the complexity of orchestrating many smaller pieces.
  • (6:15) Ian advises against going too small - Nanoservices - where the overhead of a service overshadows the utility value of it.
  • (6:30) "It's really hard to get a feel in a new domain of where those points are that you can slice effectively" - one solution is to start exploring the domain in a traditional monolithic way and to break the parts apart at the seems to get the tradeoff right.
• Tooling and support
  • (7:06) Jon asks what a good way to manage these services including profiling and monitoring.
  • (7:20) Ian recommends some tools to help:
    • New Relic for introspective monitoring and diagnostics.
    • Logstash or Splunk for log analysis and the usefulness of adding a GUID to a request that flows through messages and logs to correlate the activity.
    • Zookeeper or Consul for service registration and discovery.
  • (8:28) Scott Allen and Ian talk about how Microservices take forward SOA principles such as autonomous services, not sharing types and stable interfaces.
  • (9:00) Scott Allen asks what options for communications between the services are and Ian compares HTTP, Sockets and message queues like RabbitMQ.
• Ian's Brighter .NET lightweight Microservices project
  • (10:20) Basic two parts of Brighter are:
    • Command Dispatcher/Processor - Maps a command to a processor with a pipeline where you can insert orthogonal operations like logging and monitoring
    • Task Queue - Allows some commands will be handled asynchronously elsewhere
  • Very simple for the developer - just write a command and a handler.
  • Easy to embed in your existing Windows service if using something like Topshelf.
  • Provides timeouts, retries and a circuit breaker inspired by Netflix's Hystrix in a declarative manner.
  • (12:45) Scott Allen clarifies how easy it is to get two services talking to each other using this via RabbitMQ.
  • (13:00) Ian talks about future support for Azure Service Bus and the possibility of producing one for Redis - RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS are already supported.
  • (13:30) Scott Allen asks if this is used in production and Ian explains how Huddle started with using RX on the server and had difficulties managing subscriptions.
  • (14:20) Brighter is on ThoughtWorks Technology Radar and evangelized by ex-Huddlers at their new roles.
  • (14:40) Ian talks about the importance of good documentation and welcomes feedback on theirs.
  • (15:10) Ian mentions they facilitate hexagonal architecture.
  • Scott Allen asks if you can use in-process and Ian explains the subtleties
• Wrap-up
  • (16:00) Ian's time is sucked up by being a a new dad, congratulations!
  • (16:30) The one job of a parent is keeping children alive.
  • (16:40) Thank-you and goodbye.

Show Links:

• Fowler & Lewis on Microservices
• New Relic for .NET documentation
• Decoupling from ASP.NET - Hexagonal Architecture with Ian Cooper at NDC 2014
• Chris Fidao on Hexagonal Architecture

These show notes were contributed by Damien Guard. Thanks!

Episode 209

While at NDC Oslo, Jon talked to Robert Friberg about in-memory databases in general. They discussed OrigoDB, Robert's open source in-memory database, as well as Redis and SQL Server Hekaton.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 209: Robert Friberg on In-memory Databases and OrigoDB

Show Notes:

• Hello
  • (00:18) Jon asks Robert what his presentation was about. Robert describes his talk covering in-memory databases, comparing OrigoDB, Redis and Heketon.
• OrigoDB and working with in-memory databases
  • (00:40) OrigoDB is Robert's open source project. Jon asks why Robert decided to write his own in-memory database when there others available. Robert says that OrigoDB is unique, and that they've been working on it for a long time and there was nothing available when they started on it.
  • (01:18) Jon asks how it compares to relational databases. Robert says that when you move to in-memory, you're no longer constrained by the need to structure your data in a way that can be easily stored on disk. You can take advantage of the random access nature of memory, and thing more graph oriented than stream oriented.
  • (02:07) Jon asks if the data is persisted and follows ACID principles. Robert says that the data is in memory in any form you like, and you log transactions when you make changes - writing the events to disk or a database.
  • (02:48) Jon asks how data is loaded when an application starts up. Robert says it loads the most recent snapshot and then replays all events that occurred after the snapshot. You can choose the serialization format - JSON, binary and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) are supported. Protocol Buffers fast, compact and interoperable.
• (03:45) Jon asks what kinds of applications work best with OrigoDB. Robert describes the problem it solves: data access and databases are too slow, so we need to use caching to compensate for that. Traditional relational databases were a good fit when memory was scarce, but now your entire application's data can fit in memory. Also, historically, relational databases reflected the entity model and allowing business users to run queries; now we're mapping back and forth between models which don't match. If you keep all the data in memory, everything's in one place and the data access is incredibly fast. That allows you to do everything single-threaded, really quickly - on Robert's laptop he can do 50,000 ACID transactions per second.
• (07:35) Jon asks what the difference is between using OrigoDB and just using his own in-memory structures. Robert explains that's how OrigoDB works - you use your own in-memory structures and do LINQ queries against them. OrigoDB adds in snapshotting, persistence, etc.
• OrigoDB support for clustering
• (08:22 ) Robert says that in addition to the embedded engine, they also have an out-of-process server product that supports clustering with replication, load balancing, and off-site backup.
• (09:12) Jon asks how the clusters communicate. Robert says that it's via TCP, inspired by SQL Server clustering.
• (09:50) Jon asks what happens when the master goes offline. Robert says that there's no automatic failover, but you can do manual failover using the web-based UI.
• Other OrigoDB features: Web UI, cross-platform, cached queries
• (10:29) Jon asks about the web UI. Robert says there's a web-based UI that runs in the engine using Nancy. It supports some nice features, including ad-hoc queries using Razor syntax
• (11:33) OrigoDB's bindings for JavaScript and Protocol Buffers support cross-platform applications.
• (12:35) You work with OrigoDB using commands and queries. You can also send in LINQ commands as text and they'll be compiled, parameterized and cached.
• How Much Memory?
• (13:17) Jon asks how much memory it will take. Robert says over the past twenty years, the transactional workloads for the projects he's worked on have all been under 200GB. You can offload your reporting data to a relational database if needed.
• Business Model
• (14:18) Jon asks if the server product is commercial software. Robert said they've tried the revenue model but haven't had any sales. In the next release, they're pivoting to everything free and open source and trying to build a support business.
• Case Study
• (15:15) Jon asks what kinds of projects he's built with OrigoDB. Robert talks about a consulting job for a large healthcare company in Sweden. The customer was having really bad performance problems - each service would create business components, which would then create data components. Due to the business requirements, the data transactions were complex, and many were written using cursors. Robert said he traced some database use and found that a single transaction could make thousands of database round-trips. Robert did a proof of concept using simple C# collections in-memory and found they could do tens of thousands of transactions per second. Robert says that transactions in SQL Server require logging pages of data to disk, whereas logging an OrigoDB transaction is often just a few bytes since it's just logging the command.
• Snapshots
• (18:18) Jon asks how many snapshots are maintained. Robert says he tries to avoid snapshots since they require a read lock. You can also use an immutable model (using multi-version cursor control).
• (19:21) You can truncate events when you snapshot, but then you're losing information. Robert and Jon discuss how this relates to event sourcing.
• Other In-Memory Databases: SQL Server Hekaton, Redis, VoltDB
• (20:02) Jon asks what Robert showed off in his talk. Robert says he normally does workshops that are a few days long, so squeezing everything into an hour is difficult. He does demonstrations showing OrigoDB, Redis and Hekaton, but his main message is that your application's data probably fits in memory and memory is cheap.
• (21:03) Jon asks about Hekaton. Robert explains how Hekaton works, pointing out that it supports a hybrid model in which only certain tables are in-memory. The advantage is that you can use your existing SQL Server tools, ecosystem and code.
• (23:20) Robert mentions VoltDB, a startup that offers an in-memory, distributed relational database engine.
• Redis is a key-value store. Most people use it as a cache, but the values in themselves are structures, so a value can be a hashtable, list, queue, sorted set, etc. There are predefined commands that kind of look like assembler.
• (24:45) Jon says he remembers running into some objects that were difficult to serialize. Robert says that the default formatter for OrigoDB is the binary formatter, and you have to mark your objects as serializable. If you use Protocol Buffers require you to define a mapping.

Show Links:

• Robert Friberg (https://about.me/robertfriberg, @RobertFriberg)
• OrigoDB
• Video: IMDB showdown - comparing OrigoDB, Redis and SQL Server Hekaton
• Protocol Buffers
• SQL Server In-Memory OLTB (Hekaton)
• Redis
• VoltDB

Episode 208

While at NDC Oslo, K Scott and Jon talked to Chris Klug about pragmatically applying SOLID principles and on moving from Silverlight to HTML5.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 208: Chris Klug on SOLID principles and migrating from Silverlight to Angular and TypeScript

Show Notes:

• Hello There
  • (00:18) Jon says hi to Chris Klug and mispronounces his name and feels bad about it but Chris is understanding and lets it go.
• SOLID principles and Pragmatism
  • (00:27) Chris has been doing SOLID talks for a while, but this time he spoke about when to use SOLID principles and when not to. However, open-closed and Liskov substitution principle are both examples that might not fit into all scenarios. Chris says if you go full-SOLID you might never ship anything... and shipping is a good feature, too.
  • (01:28) Jon asks Chris if he gets some pushback. Chris says he does, from both sides.
  • (02:20) K Scott asks Chris about how he applies the Single Responsibility Principle.
• Migrating from Silverlight to Angular and TypeScript
  • (03:35) K Scott asks Chris about the kind of projects he's building lately. Chris mentions one project moving from Silverlight to Angular, another moving form WPF to Angular. He's found that patterns he used in Silverlight development - MVVM, dependency injection, data services - translate really well to Angular. The only downside is moving from C# to JavaScript, so he's using TypeScript a lot now. He recommends starting with JavaScript so you learn the platform, then move to TypeScript.
  • (05:44) K Scott asks Chris if he'd always use TypeScript. Chris says maybe not for simple projects, since TypeScript makes things a little more complicated due to the transpiler step. But the type safety's really nice for any larger project.
  • (06:28) Jon says he thinks that Silverlight was a good bridge to HTML5 since it let you get started with things like video on the web long before HTML5 supported them. Chris kind of agrees, but points out that HTML5 video still doesn't support DRM, and he still prefers XAML to HTML and CSS.
  • (08:22) Jon asks what Chris would recommend to developers who are starting on the transition from XAML to HTML5. Chris says just jump in and get started - probably using Angular and TypeScript. It's really not that hard once you get started.
• Kite surfing and being a rock star
  • (09:00) Jon asks Chris what he does for fun in his free time. Chris says he's a kite boarder, which is a little tricky because he lives in Stockholm.
  • (09:42) Jon asks Chris about his picture from the NDC speakers page, and Chris tells the story.
  • (10:24) K Scott asks Chris about the best spots he's been kite boarding, and Chris mentions a few in South Africa. 

Show Links:

• Chris Klug (http://chris.59north.com/, @ZeroKoll)
• Video: Applying S.O.L.I.D. Principles in .NET/C# - Chris Klug

Episode 207

While at NDC Oslo, K Scott and Jon talked to Damian about ASP.NET 5, running DNX cross-platform (including Raspberry Pi), the exploratory work he and the team are doing to make ASP.NET 5 run really fast, TagHelpers, and his favorite Redmond craft beers.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 207: Damian Edwards on ASP.NET 5, DNX everywhere, and experimental servers on Windows

Show Notes:

• Hello
• (00:18) K Scott asks about the general status of ASP.NET 5 and what Damian's been up to. Damian mentions the work the team's been up to and the two talks and two days of workshops he and Jon just completed.
• ASP.NET 5 - portability and cross-platform
• (01:16) K Scott asks about the advantages of running ASP.NET 5 on the Core CLR. Damian says the big advantages are portability (bundle the runtime with your app) and cross-platform - anything beyond that is secondary. It is lighter, more compact, etc., but that's not the main goal.
• (03:04) Jon talks about how he went through a depressing smackdown trying to talk managers into letting him upgrade corporate apps to ASP.NET 2.0 (when it first came out) and the "one framework per server" monster shut him down. Damian points out that you do lose some things in translations - there are some Windows abstractions and API's that will only be available in the full CLR. So if you have a requirement for Windows-specific functionality (COM, directory services, etc.), you'll need to run your application on the full .NET Framework.
• (03:59) K Scott asks about the experience of bundling the runtime with your application. Damian describes how he demonstrated this during his presentation, bundling multiple runtimes (e.g. Linux, Mono, Mac, Windows) with an application.
• (04:38) K Scott asks hosting on Linux. Damian describes Kestrel, the web host for ASP.NET 5 that runs on libuv (used by Node and other servers).
• ASP.NET 5 HTTP Performance, Pipelining and HTTP 2
• (05:50) K Scott asks how Damian expects ASP.NET 5 to perform relative to Node.js. Damian describes the performance testing testing he an his team have started looking at using the TechEmpower benchmarks. He lists several abstractions and implementations they've looked at, starting with the simplest benchmark that just tests plaintext response.
• (10:15) Damian explains how pipelining works. K Scott asks about how HTTP 2 fits it. Damian talks about how both enable higher HTTP throughput.
• (12:17) Jon asks if the useful the HTTP plaintext test is and Damian talks about this test focuses on efficiency in speaking HTTP, there are a lot of other tests and features they'll need to look at as they move up the stack.
• (12:55) K Scott asks why the ASP.NET 5 stack is nearly twice as fast as ASP.NET 4.x for plaintext responses. Damian talks about how legacy compatibility in ASP.NET 4.x extends all the way back to classic ASP, whereas ASP.NET 5 only pulls in specific features as needed by the application.
• (14:44) Damian says they'll also be looking at massive concurrency (important for realtime applications) and asynchronous background work.
• (15:32) Jon incorrectly guesses that async background work will be important for pipeline scenarios.  Damian says that since pipelining only works over the same connection, so this is more relevant for HTTP 2.
• Minimizing Kernel / User Mode Transitions
• (16:56) Jon asks about the importance of switching between kernel and user mode. Damian explains why that transition is necessary and the performance impact it has. He talks about how some of the memory management techniques they're looking at.
• (21:12) Jon asks about some newer APIs Damian had previously mentioned to him. Damian talks about Registered IO (RIO) in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 R2. K Scott asks about HTTP.SYS kernel mode caching.
• (24:07) Jon asks if there are some performance impacts he should pay attention to as a web developer. Damian talks about the process ASP.NET MVC pipeline and how content could be double or triple buffered in some cases as it moved through the pipeline. That's an issue when you're looking at client-side optimization, because bytes aren't flushed to the client as early as possible. In ASP.NET MVC 6, it's now possible to explicitly flush content, and the double and triple buffering has been removed.
• (27:14) K Scott asks about the baseline KB allocated per request. Damian said that previously it was 15-40 KB per request before your application code did anything; now it's under a KB. There are some other buffers they can probably pool as well.
• TagHelpers
• (28:22) Jon asks TagHelpers. Damian explains some of the problems with HTML Helpers, especially when you need to control the HTML that's being output. TagHelpers allow you to call HTML Helpers using an HTML-like syntax (tags and attributes) so you get all of the benefits of working in the HTML editor.
• What do you do for fun?
• (30:33) K Scott asks Damian what he does for fun. Damian talks about craft beers in Redmond and his new espresso machine. K Scott asks Damian about some of his favorite craft breweries; Damian talks about Kilty MacSporran and Hogus Maximus from Postdoc Brewing and Black Raven Brewing Co.  

Show Links:

• Damian Edwards (@DamianEdwards)
• Video: ASP.NET 5 & DNX: It's a X-Platform Party! 
• Video: What's new in ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6
• TechEmpower tests - Plaintext requirement
• Postdoc Brewing
• Black Raven Brewing Co.

Episode 206

While at NDC Oslo, K Scott and Jon talked to Rachel about accessibility (web and otherwise) and testing.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 206: Rachel Appel on Accessibility and Unit Testing

Show Notes:

• Accessibility
• (00:18) Jon starts by asking Rachel what aspects of accessibility she addressed in her talk. Rachel overviews some aspects: visual, auditory, motor and cognitive needs.
• (02:20) Rachel describes how increasing font size on a page is a really quick change that helps a lot of people, pointing out that eyeglasses are an accessibility technology.
• (02:50) Using HTML semantic tags and ARIA attributes help people who are using screen readers to navigate your site - otherwise screen readers have to read through ads, page headers, etc. for every single page.
• (03:45) There are 1.4 billion people with some kind of accessible needs.
• (04:06) K Scott asks how well modern screen readers handle things like semantic HTML markup. Rachel says yes, and also mentions alt tags for images. Jon and Rachel discuss how easy it is to just rename divs to semantic tags like header and nav.
• (05:13) Jon asks what ARIA is. Rachel says it stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and describes how ARIA attributes can give hints to screen readers for things like required fields and validation errors.
• (06:44) Rachel recommends that listeners download a screen reader like NVDA or WebAnywhere, blindfold yourself and take some time navigating their sites to understand the experience.
• (07:28) K Scott asks about building SPA sites with technologies like React, Angular, Ember. Rachel says that ARIA elements still work, and there are ARIA and semantic elements that indicate to screen readers that navigation is occurring. K Scott asks if navigation within a SPA causes the screen reader to start over; Rachel says that it does and recommends using skip links. Rachel recommends visiting the accessibility site webaim.org, which shows a good example of using skip links.
• (09:25) Jon asks how Rachel got interested in accessibility. She's worked on a lot of government sites which require accessibility standards, but she's just personally interested in making sites that are easy to use. She describes some of the frustrations in browsing websites with ads and modals, then points out that it's even worse for users with accessible needs. Users with accessible needs make up 20% of the population, so you can easily justify any extra work as worthwhile just in expanding your user base by 20%.
• (12:30) K Scott asks if Rachel has any other resource recommendations. She recommends using the WAVE scanner on the WebAIM site, which indicates a number of issues including contrast.
• Jon asks about color blindness considerations. Rachel says that it's also important - Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind. She recommends using a tool called the Color Oracle. Rachel and K Scott discuss a number of considerations to make sure your sites and applications make sense to users with color blindness issues.
• Testing
• (15:55) Rachel gave another talk about testing with ASP.NET MVC. She covered xUnit for testing application code, qUnit for front-end testing, and UI automation testing. She recommends starting with unit testing, then adding in front-end and automation testing.
• (16:50) Rachel thinks UI automation testing is kind of a hidden gem - Visual Studio has coded UI tests, which can emulate user actions, which just records your UI interactions so that it can play them back later. K Scott asks about timing issues and Jon asks about use with single page application. Rachel says just consider coded UI tests as a user - you can even have a QA or actual users click through the site and record their actions. K Scott asks what versions of Visual Studio support it. (ed. note: the recorder is only in Visual Studio Enterprise).
• (18:50) K Scott asks what Rachel does to relax when she's not testing and calling people out for accessibility issues, and Rachel tells us her upcoming travel plans.

Show Links:

• Rachel Appel (www.rachelappel.com, @RachelAppel)
• Video: Designing and Programming Accessible Website and App UIs
• Video: All Your Tests Are Belong To Us
• NVDA
• WebAnywhere
• WebAIM
• Color Oracle
• Visual Studio Coded UI Tests

Episode 205

While at NDC Oslo, K Scott and Jon caught up with Udi Dahan to discuss his experiences in building a distributed company (Particular Software) to offer support and services for NServiceBus and related technologies.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 205: Udi Dahan on Starting a Company Based on an Open Source Project

Show Notes:

• Hello There
  • (00:18) K Scott introduces Udi Dahan, whom we last spoke to in 2010.
• Growing from an open source project to commercial product: how and why
  • (00:41) Udi describes why he started a company to better support the NServiceBus community. On his own, he wasn't able to both support himself doing NServiceBus training and the NServiceBus project. He decided he was doing his users a disservice by continuing the free open source model, but he wasn't sure it would work since there weren't really precedents for taking an open source project commercial in the .NET world.
  • (03:17) K Scott asks Udi about the global reach of his distributed company.
• Commercial Software and Licensing Are Hard
  • (04:10) Udi describes the learning curve to start selling a commercial product - complications with contracts, legal issues, etc. Pricing is complicated, too, because companies are structured so differently.
  • (06:43) K Scott asks if each customer requires a separate license.
  • (07:11) Jon asks what commercial model they settled on. Udi explains that the "call for a quote" model is common for large customers, but for "normal" customers it's generally $25 per month for a developer machine.
  • (08:15) Jon asks what changed with respect to the license and code availability. Udi explains that the code is still on GitHub, the license just changed for cases where it's being used commercially and developers don't want to release their code. The code is now under the RPL - the Reciprocal Public License.
  • (09:12) Jon asks about the difference between the RPL and the AGPL licenses. Udi explains that AGPL explains that AGPL only requires releasing your code to your users in order to use the code for free, so there's a loophole for cases like large intranet deployments. RPL requires releasing your code to the world for free use, not just to your users.
  • (10:37) Jon says he's happy to see open source as a thriving business model. Udi clarifies a bit - the common approach is a service based open source model, but this it really pushes you towards working with a few very large customers. The problems with this approach is that you're both subject to large risk if you lose your giant customers, and you're competing with enterprise vendors who have deep pockets.
• Running a Distributed Company
  • (13:44) K Scott asks Udi how he manages a growing, distributed company. Udi says that it's good that the growth doesn't happen all at once.
  • (15:15) Jon asks how they handle communications. Udi says it's important to write everything down and to make use of lots of web conferencing. All web conference meetings are recorded so people can catch up later. Jon says says he thinks that writing everything down makes things easier for your company over time. Udi says he wouldn't say it's easier, it's more of a maturity forcing function - if you're able to get through it, you're able to do a lot more and get new employees up to speed a lot faster.
• Surprise Lightning Round!
  • (18:43) K Scott springs a surprise Lighting Round on Udi!
  • (18:56) Microservices
  • (20:27) CQR
  • (22:03) Event Sourcing
• (26:43) K Scott asks what Udi does to relax in his spare time. Udi says he's got four kids, which isn't necessarily relaxing but definitely occupies his free time.

Show Links:

• Udi Dahan (www.UdiDahan.com, @UdiDahan)
• Particular Software
• Particular Software on GitHub
• Reciprocal Public License
• Herding Code 67: Udi Dahan on Scalability

Episode 204

The guys talk to Sara J. Chipps and Geroge Stocker about Jewelbots: smart jewelry for a smarter generation.

Note: They were called Jewliebots when the podcast was recorded, but were since renamed to Jewelbots.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 204: Sara Chipps and George Stocker on Jewelbots

Show Notes:

• Hello There
• (00:55) Sara and George introduce themselves and how they got involved in Jewelbots.
• Jewelbot Features and Platform
• (02:12) K Scott asks what Jewelbots is all about.  Jewelbots are programable wearables for teenage girls. They're friendship bracelets that help them learn how to code. K Scott remarks that they're not just wearables that track the number of steps taken each day, and Sara says from their interviews, teenage girls couldn't care less about that. Out of the box, they have communication and friendship features, but they're open source so they can be extended to do things like let them know when they have a new Instagram follower or when their mom is on the way. There will be code snippets available to allow them to get started by copy / paste, then to share code they've writing. There will be a repository on GitHub for sharing and collaboration.
• (05:06) K Scott asks how they decided on this platform. Sara talks about how they were inspired by Minecraft, and how they saw young people learning Java so they could write their own mods. They talked to over 100 girls, and learned that some of their initial assumptions were horribly wrong.
• (05:55) Jon asks what was horribly wrong about their assumptions, and Sara says that just having jewelry change color to match their clothes wasn't that exciting to them - they're really interested in their friends and friend groups. You configure them to react to your friends and friend groups.
• Hardware Specifics
• (08:00) Kevin asks what it's like from a coding perspective. Sara says it's based on Arduino, so you can use the Arduino library on the bracelet to control the Bluetooth, microprocessor, LEDs and motor. George says the code for the predefined APIs will be available so girls can consult the existing code to see how things were built.
• (08:50) K Scott asks if Bluetooth is used to detect nearby friends. Sara explains that it's a mesh Bluetooth network (something they've patented) that allows the bracelets to work without requiring their phones with them. 
• (09:15) Scott asks why they didn't use RFID instead of Bluetooth. Sara explains that RFID only works for a few inches, whereas Bluetooth gives them 30 to 50 feed.
• (10:10) Jon asks if it's possible to extend the software, or to connect other devices via Bluetooth.
• (11:22) Sara explains that the actual hardware is in a small disk, so it is possible that it could be applied to other use cases.
• (12:25) K Scott asks what was the hardest part about developing it. Sara explains that hardware is so much more difficult than software, and how it's so much harder to change things later.
• (13:28) Jon asks about the power and battery life. Sara explains the bracelet stand that can charge via USB charger and says they're still figuring out the battery life.
• (14:32) Scott says they should build in kinetic charging and and asks about adding in sensors. Sara says that for size and cost constraints they decided to leave out sensors.
• (15:35) Scott asks if they're 3D printing them themselves, or working with sweatshops in New Jersey. Sara says they're working with PCH and will be manufacturing in China for production, but they're currently working with local manufacturers for small runs.
• (16:54) Jon asks what hardware is onboard. Sara runs down the list: a microprocessor / Bluetooth unit that's 4mm square, a motor, 4 LEDs, and a button and a battery. George says that the button can be used for a lot of things, including morse code or other codes they come up with.
• Cost, Funding and Kickstarter
• (18:59) Jon asks how much they'll cost. Sara says they're shooting for $60 but it will vary based on a lot of factors. They targeted $60 as it's the cost of a video game.
• (19:58) Scott has another product suggestion: a backpack locator that shows hot / cold on the LEDs.
• (20:19) Kevin asks about how they got started from a funding perspective. Sara talks about the funding history and hardware projects are more costly.
• (21:26) Jon says Jewelbots sounds like something he'd see on Kickstarter. Sara says that they're planning to launch a Kickstarter soon, but they want to get the Jewelbot cost figured out first. There's the obligatory discussion of Kickstarter successes and failures. Scott says that the companies that already have their production pipeline figured out before launching are a lot more successful than vague "I have a dream" Kickstarters. Sara says they've also heard that you really need to have your costs figured out before launching a Kickstarter.
• The First Rule of Introducing Girls To Coding: Don't Call It Coding
• (24:50) Kevin asks if there are concerns that the Arduino IDE may be too low level, and if they might make an easier onramp. Sara says they don't think they'll convert every young girl into a coder, but they'll help a lot of them to look at code in a way they haven't before. One important thing they've learned is not to call it coding as that scares a lot of people off. Sara says that the opposite of maker is not girly - they want to make being a maker accessible. So if a small percentage actually become coders but the rest just become more comfortable with the idea of coding and engineering, they'll have accomplished their goal. Sara talks about Super Awesome Sylvia - a 13 year old girl who does all kinds of cool things with Arduinos.
• Getting Started With Hardware... And Just How Hard Is Hardware, Anyway?
• (27:22) Kevin asks how Sara made the jump from software to hardware. Sara talks about her introduction by Emily Rose (@nexxylove) at Node Dublin 2012 with a bullfighting drone and an out of control fog machine, and she was hooked on the spot. She started with getting LEDs to light up - the hardware equivalent of Hello World - and went from there.
• (29:30) Scott talks about how much more you have to think about with hardware as compared to software, and how it's probably a good exercise for software developers to think differently about how they write their code. George talks about how he's new to hardware, and how power drain and battery life concerns made them think about things like haptic motor startup and different power consumption for different color LEDs.
• Important Questions In Random Order, e.g. Charging, Release Date, the Phone App, and Piglets
• (31:43) Jon asks for more info on the charging connection. Sara explains the 4 touchpoints on the charger which are used to both charge the bracelet and upload code to the device. Scott asks if they considered using Bluetooth; Sara says that they had and the Bluetooth chip allows for that, but since many of their target users use desktops they didn't want to require Bluetooth for data transfer.
• (32:40) Jon asks if they're continuing to do user testing. Sara says that they're doing that constantly, and it's been really important.
• (33:45) Kevin asks how soon they'll be shipping, and Sara says hoping to ship by late 2015 / early 2016.
• (34:24) Jon asks if they're experimenting different charm designs with 3D printing. Sara says they're using injeciton molding for the charms, and that Jewelbots will ship with a default charm and band but they're interchangeable so they're expecting and encouraging people to make them their own.
• (35:35) George talks about the phone app which allows for more of an if-this-then-that style of programming, which will be simpler.
• (36:32) There's a question on twitter about Sara's thoughts on piglets.
• (37:27) Jon asks for more details about the phone app. George says it's an Android and iOS app that allows you to add new friends and set up how your Jewelbot should react if you're around different friend groups. He explains a bit more about how things are stored on the bracelet, the phone app, and a central web server.
• (39:14) K Scott asks how devices are identified so you can select your friends. George says you'll identify yourself when you set up the device and standard Bluetooth pairing handles connections. He talks about how some of the Bluetooth things they're doing use new parts of the BLE spec that nobody's done yet, so they're figuring things out.
• (40:18) Jon asks if it's possible to do firmware updates. Sara says that the Bluetooth chip they're using allows for over the air updates, so they can distribute firmware updates to all devices from Jewelbot Central. George talks about the complications in the hardware world you don't think about in the software world - for instance, someone can decide not to take a firmware update, so you have to make sure things still work even if they don't take firmware updates.
• (41:20) Sara says that Jewelbots will not help parents find their daughters. You'll need to manage that yourself.
• Important Things You Should Click On
• (41:43) Sara talks about the upcoming Kickstarter as well as the (now available) Quire campaign so you can be part of their growth and part of their company.

Show Links:

• Jewelbots (jewelbots.com, @jewelbots)
• Jewelbots campaign on Quire: https://quire.com/c/jewelbots
• Sara J. Chipps (sarajchipps.com, @sarajchipps)
• George Stocker (georgestocker.com, @gortok)
• Super Awesome Sylvia (sylviashow.com)

Episode 203

The guys talk to Rob Eisenberg about Aurelia.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 203: Rob Eisenberg on Aurelia

Show Notes:

• [Sponsor Message]
  • (00:17) This episode is brought to you by the App Quality Bundle at http://buildbetter.software
• Hello There
  • (01:15) Kevin introduces Rob.
  • (02:05) Kevin asks Rob about his Xaml platform work with Caliburn.Micro. Rob says he's transferred that work to Nigel Sampson, and it's alive and well.
• Comparing Aurelia with Angular
  • (03:22) Kevin mentions Rob's history on the Angular team and asks what's different about Aurelia. Rob says that he's focused on vanilla Javascript code and minimizing configuration and metadata. Rob says that's unique compared to most common frameworks, not just Angular.
  • (05:25) Rob also wanted to target transpiled languages so it worked well with ES6, ES5, TypeScript and Coffeescript. By comparison, Angular was pretty focused on Dart and AtScript.
  • (06:12) Jon references Rob's post comparing Angular and Aurelia code and asks about conventions. Rob describes how conventions work, how you can create your own conventions, and how you can override conventions by providing metadata (but only for overrides, not all the time).
  • (08:56) Rob describes how binding and the templating syntax work. Aurelia minimizes additional markup for binding, whereas he sees Angular syntax focused on theoretical tooling experiences that could be built, but nobody's committed to. Also, while Angular's syntax is technically valid, it doesn't work with cases like SVG. There's a secondary binding syntax to work around that, but having two syntax doesn't seem like a clean solution.
  • (12:31) Kevin asks for examples of conventions in Aurelia. Rob explains how custom elements work with EcmaScript 6 modules and exports. No metadata is required, as compared to Angular which requires specifying metadata in all cases even if you're not using them. Rob also explains custom attributes (again using a simple exported class). Naming conventions set up the mappings so no metadata is required. Value converters are yet another example - the naming convention assumes that any class ending in ValueConverter is automatically registered and configured.
  • (16:24) Jon asks if Angular's metadata requirements and verbosity are all for tooling support. Rob says yes for the HTML side, he doesn't see a reason for it on the JavaScript side.
  • (16:43) Rob says that in Angular you need to declare all directives you're using in your view models. That really bugs Rob because the implementation details in the view shouldn't be reflected in the viewmodel. That was required for lazy loading, but he sees it as a design problem and a maintenance problem. Rob says that Aurelia uses an import in the view and doesn't touch the viewmodel, using the EcmaScript 6 loader. Rob says that this design makes some conventions impossible.
• The Aurelia Pitch
  • (21:08) Scott K says he likes the class-based design in Aurelia and asks Rob for a quick pitch for Aurelia to sell it to a team. Rob talks about the clean, standards based design that allows decomposing complex screens without requiring extra configuration. It's easy to build, extend and maintain. Rob also talks about the binding syntax, and the ability to plug in other binding strategies by dropping in an adapter. The binding strategy system has been tested out with Breeze.js and Knockout, allowing you to use your existing models without requiring unnecessary dirty checks.
  • (26:42) Scott K asks how object.observe works with tranpilers. Rob says there's a polyfill that generates getter / setter pairs if object.observe isn't available. Rob explains how this works with the micro task queue, and how it allows for queued tasks to handle queued work efficiently. Rob talks about the task-queue in Aurelia, and how it can be used outside of Aurelia as well. Rather than directly observing DOM elements, the task queue allows for batching changes for efficiency.
• Persistance
  • (35:15) Kevin asks if Aurelia handles a persistence layer. Rob says that rather than building that, they've worked to make it easy to plug popular persistence libraries in. He also discusses the validation system they're working on.
  • (38:22) Jon asks if Rob's looked at PouchDb and references Herding Code 181, in which Max Thayer explained PouchDb.
• Why not write my own framework?
  • (39:40) Jon says he frequently hears people who are tired of JavaScript frameworks and decide to just write their own. Rob describes how it's easy to get started but quickly falls apart. He describes some of the gotchas he's run into in building Aurelia, with examples from aria, svg, data- attributes. Rather than writing your own framework, Rob says you should just contribute to Aurelia.
• SVG use
  • (44:40) Jon asks if Rob thinks people will use SVG. Rob says it's more about building a production-quality framework, then gives some possible usecases like graphs, mapping and custom elements. Rob says that people do all kinds of things you might not expect when they use a framework, and building a real framework requires it. Kevin says at his last job they'd started converting image sprites to SVG, and it was a pretty good use-case.
• React
  • (49:05) Kevin asks about Rob's thoughts on React. He says it's a good renderer, but it's not a framework. He and Scott K agree that React is a library, not a framework. Rob says he wrote a blog post in which a custom Aurelia element uses React as a custom renderer. The Babel transpiler allows mixing JSX with ES6 code, and this allows continuing to use Aurelia binding. In general, Rob says really smart, but if you need a framework you'll end up cobbling a bunch of things together to use it. Instead, he'd recommend using a framework like Aurelia and just pulling in React when it's required.
  • (53:22) Kevin asks if Rob's considered adding a virtual DOM to Aurelia. Rob says it's not clear that there would be an advantage in most cases.
• Isomorphic rendering
  • (54:17) Kevin brings up the other JavaScript buzzword of the day: Isomorphic rendering. Rob says Aurelia doesn't support this, he doesn't see this sticking around. Jon says he still sees a pretty clear distinction between websites and web apps, and Rob agrees, saying he wouldn't use Aurelia for websites.
• Questions from Twitter
  • (57:25) Question from Twitter (@cecilphillip): "What's the rendering perf like compared to ReactJS?" Rob says that React is going to be a lot faster for initial render time, whereas Aurelia is probably going to be faster for updates. It's hard to give an accurate comparison; Rob says they're mostly focused on being fast enough rather than the fastest. He says Aurelia's not slow now, but they're focusing on some upcoming performance enhancements that he's expecting big results from.
  • (1:02:09) Question from Twitter (@csharpfritz): "can you talk about what lead to the choice of architecture with JSPM?" Rob explains how JSPM integrates package management with module loading. Aurelia isn't directly dependent on JSPM, so you can use other package managers and loaders if you want. Jon says the one thing he wants JSPM to integrate rate limiting so he doesn't hit the GitHub rate limit; Rob says this is being addressed in a future release since most cases don't require the hitting the rate limited API.
• Scott K's Packaging Rant(tm)
  • (1:08:11) Scott K has a "short rant" about NPM, JSPM and all package managers in general: they all use existing config files (like gitconfig) and should be tested behind corporate firewalls and proxies. And then there's the nested package thing, which doesn't work well on Windows due to path length limits. Jon says he uses the flatten-packages package. There's a short group rant about the file path length limit on Windows.
• Final questions and wrapup
  • (1:13:40) Jon asks if there are any patterns or thoughts on server-side development for Aurelia. Rob says there are starter kits on the way, and people are using Aurelia with lots of back ends (.NET, node, MEAN, etc.). He talks about samples on the way, including a Todo app (even though he thinks Todo apps aren't useful for application frameworks).
  • (1:17:15) Kevin asks where Aurelia's at in a release cycle. Rob says it's currently in preview / alpha phase but targeting a beta around June or later. Don't go to production with it now, but get ready for the release after that.

Show Links:

• Rob Eisenberg (blog, @eisenbergeffect)
• Aurelia.io
• Rob's post: Aurelia & Angular 2.0 Code Side by Side
• Herding Code 181: CouchDb, Cloudant, MyCouch and SisoDb with Max Thayer and Daniel Wertheim (PouchDb)
• Herding Code 182: Durandal Kickstarter with Rob Eisenberg
• Herding Code 151: Rob Eisenberg on RPGWithMe, Durandal, and XAML vs. HTML5 development
• Herding Code 104: Rob Eisenberg on Caliburn Micro

Episode 202

The guys talk to Ahmet Alp Balkan about Docker, containers, building an ASP.NET 5 image for Docker, and working on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 202: Ahmet Alp Balkan on Docker

Show Notes:

• Working on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft
  • (00:17) Jon introduces Ahmet and asks what it's like being on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft. Ahmet explains what his team does. Ahmet's mostly a Unix stack developer, he doesn't use Windows on a daily basis.
  • (02:20) Jon asks Ahmet if it's strange working on open source and Linux and Microsoft, and if there are a lot of legal requirements.
• Intro to Docker
  • (03:48) Jon asks Ahmet to describe how Docker works, and how it compares to traditional virtual machines.
  • (05:54) Jon asks about how the Docker works with the Linux filesystem approach. Ahmet explains namespaces in Linux and describes how namespaces provide separation between instances. One benefit is that each instance is really lightweight, so you can have hundreds of instances on one physical machine.
  • (09:47) K. Scott asks about a specific example deploying a Ruby on Rails application. Ahmet describes two options for creating a creating an image - either doing it manually or using a dockerfile. K Scott and Ahmet discuss inheritance chains for containers.
  • (13:35) Kevin asks about how inheritance works when you've got an application that relies on services in different parent containers - is there communication between them? Ahmet describes how the application files are based on diffs from each container level. Rather than modifying a running container, you should instead define and deploy a new instance.
  • (17:07) K. Scott asks how different configuration between machines is handled.
• Docker on Windows
  • (18:13) K. Scott wonders how containers will work on Windows due to the registry. Ahmet talks about how it's more difficult on Windows, since on Unix everything is a file; Jon remembers the previous interview with Kenji at Spoon about how they're virtualizing the registry with their container system.
  • (20:40) Jon points out that since Docker images run on top of a host, they're not portable between different hosts on different operating systems.
• ASP.NET 5 Docker image and User Mode sandboxing questions
  • (21:21) Jon asks Ahmet about his work on creating an ASP.NET 5 Docker image.
  • (23:10) Scott K. asks about the difference between Docker images and running in user mode. Ahmet explains that Docker does run in user mode, so things are kept separate due to user mode sandboxing.
  • (25:14) Kevin asks if the host operating system has visibility to the running containers.
  • (26:12) K. Scott asks if there were any technical hurdles in creating the ASP.NET 5 Docker image. Ahmet talks about how the image was built and the general process of developing with Docker instances.
• Getting started with Docker on Windows
  • (30:15) Jon asks about different ways of getting started with Docker - Boot2Docker (running on top of VirtualBox), spinning up a Docker instance on Azure, etc.
  • (31:54) Jon asks about Ahmet's work on getting the Docker client on Windows. Ahmet talks about some of the differences in Windows operating system API's, including Go language differences.
  • (36:00) Scott K. says he's excited about Docker because it sounds a lot simpler than some of the deployment issues he deals with.
• Docker in production and container orchestration
  • (37:17) Kevin says he's heard that running Docker in production is more difficult than running it in development. Ahmet talks about some of the orchestration efforts that are underway, and talks about container linking and the datacenter operating system approach.
  • (43:14) Jon asks about Mesos. Ahmet describes what Mesosphere is doing and how it relates to orchestration.
  • (44:50) Jon asks if Azure orchestration will be similar. Ahmet says they want to play really well with the other schedulers out there.

Show Links:

• Ahmet Alp Balkan (@ahmetalpbalkan, https://ahmetalpbalkan.com/)
• Docker
• Creating an ASP.NET vNext Docker Container using Mono
• ASP.NET 5 Preview Docker Image
• Docker CLI for Windows Clients

Episode 201

Jon meets Kenji and Trevor at a small airfield in San Diego to talk about Spoon, an application containierization and streaming platform for Windows. They discuss different virtual machine approaches, Spoon's features, the container movement, and flying airplanes.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 201: Kenji Obata on Spoon, application virtualization, containers, and flying little airplanes

Show Notes:

• Application virtualization and Xenocode's origins
• (00:17) Jon says hi to Kenji and describes his first interaction with Kenji - a blog post he wrote in 2007 titled "We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines" and Kenji's response saying that's exactly what they were doing at Xenocode. Kenji describes application virtualization and lists some of the vendors working in that space.
• (1:51) Jon asks about the spectrum of virtualization - starting with virtualizing the entire machine and file system and dialing back. Kenji describes how Xenocode started with a solution that would allow for deploying .NET applications without requiring a separate .NET framework installation. This had minimal virtualization - just enough to virtualize the .NET framework.
• (06:07) Kenji describes the work to move from virtualizing the .NET framework to supporting application virtualization for any arbitrary Windows application, culminating with virtualizing Office.
• Moving from application virtualization to application streaming
• (08:24) After solving virtualization for any Windows application, Xenocode moved on to tackling application delivery - solving long downloads, installation, and application conflicts. They also wanted to do this all over the web, which was the genesis of Spoon. This had a lot of appeal to business users rather than just coders, so they rebranded from Xenocode to Spoon.
• (11:15) Jon asks about application streaming with the example of Office Click-to-Run. Kenji discusses Click Once and how that relates to MSI installers. While some application streaming solutions solve the problem of "click button, run application" they are still installing on the computer so you hit problems with conflicts between applications.
• (13:20) Spoon applications are portable because they're not installed on the local machine. Kenji and Jon discuss how installing an using an application start changing the state of the machine in many places outside of the application directory - registry, user profile, etc.
• (14:30) Kenji describes how many of their enterprise customers have complex legacy applications which blend several technologies and don't always follow best practices.
• Docker and containers
• (15:35) Kenji talks about how they've grown from looking at the smaller, targeted problem of virtualizing and deploying a single application to a holistic view of containers as a fundamental part of the development and deployment process.
• (16:30) Kenji says that the excitement around Docker has got the community thinking more about application virtualization. Jon asks Kenji to explain how Docker-style virtualization is different from traditional virtual machine virtualization. Kenji explains how Docker was originally built on Linux lxc in which the kernel can segregate itself into several namespaces. Jon asks how it relates to file system virtualization, and Kenji says that since in Linux there's an "everything is a file" philosophy, it's easier to segregate things this way.
• (18:10) Kenji says that there's really no virtualization engine in Docker, it's more of a set of scripting languages around Linux features. Kenji says that perhaps Docker's biggest contribution is the term "container" since it's more consumer-friendly and makes it more obvious that containerized applications are portable.
• (19:55) Jon says that his experience with Spoon is that it felt like git for virtual machines. Kenji says that Docker actually uses git for storage. He explains how the storage needs of application virtualization lend themselves to git-like storage.
• (21:44) Kenji says that containers on Windows are more difficult because there isn't an lxc feature in the kernel. Fortunately, Spoon already has a vm engine that can provide that.
• Advantages to running in user mode
• (22:12) Kenji mentions that Spoon is running in user mode rather than kernel mode, and explains why it's important to segregate and run child systems in user mode without any need for kernel access. Users don't need any special privileges to install Spoon applications, and even if there are security issue in the virtualized applications, they're always just running as an unprivileged user the host operating system.
• Getting started with Spoon
• (24:10) Jon talks about the user experience on Spoon.net - quick install with no permission prompts, and a console window pops up.
• (25:24) Kenji points out that because Spoon started with virtualizing desktop applications, the Spoon container approach works well with any Windows application, including GUI applications.
• Virtual networking features
• (26:12) Jon asks how he can add add to a Spoon VM once he's created it. Kenji points out one approach by spinning up another VM and connecting them using Spoon's virtualized network feature. He talks about how you can use the virtual network features to point your application with multiple VM's all using virtualized networking and the virtual DNS service.
• (29:20) Jon talks about how virtual networking on other systems like Hyper-V can be problematic because it's messing with the host operating system's network adapters and networking configuration.
• Spinning up multi-VM environments
• (30:28) Jon says that all of these features sound really useful for testing, because he can spin up an entire environment, test it all, and delete it, all from a script. Kenji says they've put a lot of focus into those scenarios, and since Spoon VM's are so lightweight that you can spin up 20 or 30 VM's on a dev machine. He talks about a customer that has about 20 servers in their test environment and spins them all up for tests on a single host.
• Selenium support and legacy Windows features
• (32:42) Kenji says they have first class Selenium test grid support, allowing web developers to run automated web tests against a wide variety of operating systems and browsers. Jon asks how this works IE versions are tied to versions of Windows. Kenji talks about the Windows version support they've built into Spoon, allowing a Spoon host on Windows 8 to run every IE version back to IE6.
• (34:37) Kenji talks about Windows version support and stacks and conditional layer support in Spoon to allow wiring in complex emulation behavior so you can deliver one image that will run on a variety of Windows hosts.
• Working with images and state
• (35:44) Jon asks about how the "spoon run dotnet,jdk,node,nginx" support works, and Kenji says you can use that to compose an arbitrary number of base images.
• (36:36) Kenji says that they heard a lot of customers were bringing in git support to build a project that's hosted in git, but they didn't really want it in the image. They added another "using" primitive to allow you to use support from an image without adding it to the base VM.
• (37:53) Jon asks how to add features to the Spoon VM after it's been created, in the case that he really does want them there. Kenji says that I can just save the container's state as an image, then build another container on top of that image. Images are static, containers are not.
• (39:01) Kenji talks about the state abstraction, allowing you to continue from any saved state id. These move between different computers, which is helpful for testing and parallelization.
• The Spoon.net hub and what you can do for free
• (41:00) Kenji mentions the Spoon.net hub, which is free to use for public use - similar to GitHub. Jon asks about what's available for free use, and Kenji says Spoon.net use is unlimited (within reason).
• (42:01) Kenji explains how their previous version required their Spoon Studio tool to configure applications, similar to App-V sequencing. Things are simplified now with Spoon - you just grab a clean image, install software on it using the standard installers, and commit the image and you're done.
• (44:04) Kenji highlights the advantage of having the clean image readily available, so you can easily get a clean Windows install to try or test software - just by typing "spoon run clean".
• Trying things with "spoon try"
• (45:13) Jon says he likes to use VM's to get a clean machine state, and also to be  try installing some software without risk. Kenji talks about the "spoon try" command, and explains how try automatically wipes all your state when you're done (whereas spoon run maintains state).
• Deployment options
• (47:38) Jon asks how IT managers roll out Spoon solutions to their users. Kenji says they provide a set of tools to integrate with existing deployment models, including support for desktop icon registration, scripting, and the web interface to allow launching from intranets.
• Size and performance impact
• (49:00) Jon asks about the size of a Spoon VM. Kenji says it's essentially just the size of the installed software and the state, so it's pretty minimal. Storage is delta-based, so it's small. The Spoon database includes de-duplication to allow for frequently saving state without bloat.
• (51:01) Jon asks about the performance impact due to virtualizing everything. Kenji says that since the VM's are so lightweight, it's very minimal. He gives examples of high-performance users, including AutoCAD and video game developers.
• Azure RemoteApp support
• (52:29) Jon asks Kenji about something he saw on the site mentioning that Azure support was coming soon. Kenji gives us an exclusive scoop on the upcoming RemoteApp support. This allows you to create a single base VHD on Azure with just Spoon installed on it, then use Spoon's support to host any application via RemoteApp. He says it's great to be able to use RemoteApp support when he's on his Mac to run any Windows applications he needs.
• (56:53) Jon recommends for listeners to go to Spoon.net and try it in a few seconds for free.
• Flying little airplanes
• (57:21) Jon notes that they're recording the podcast at an airfield and asks Kenji and Trevor about how they got into flying. Jon notes how high-tech the plane controls are and asks how it compares to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Kenji talks about the excitement and terror of his first takeoff.
• (1:01:29) Kenji says that an easy way to give flying a try is to contact a flight school at your local airfield and set up an introductory flight for about $100 - $150 to give it a try.

Show Links:

• Spoon.net (@spoonapps)
• Kenji Obata (http://kenj.io, @virtualkenji)
• Jon's post: We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines
• Joel Spolsky: Please Sir May I Have a Linker
• Ship Your Apps to Azure RemoteApp with Containers