Herding Code

Episode 200

The guys talk about the Node / iojs fork, Angular 2, K Scott's new Microsoft Band and other wearables, Kickstarter successes and failures, container technologies like Docker, and some recent articles about women heroes of coding.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 200: io.js, Angular angst, K Scott's new Band, Kickstarters, Containers and Old School Elite Women Coders

Show Notes:

• The Node / io.js fork
  • (00:41) Jon asks Kevin what's going on with the io.js fork. Kevin says the fork is due to the Node team's slow release cycle. Jon asks what technical things people are looking for, and whether io.js code is supposed to be compatible with Node code. Scott K lists some of the features planned for Node 0.12. There's some general discussion about what this means long-term and whether this will be a temporary or permanent fork.
• Angular angst
  • (06:21) Jon asks K Scott what is going on in the Angular world. K Scott summarizes why people were bent out of shape over the Angular 2 announcements.
  • (07:30) Jon asks what this all means from Angular developers - what's actually changed? K Scott discusses how the team isn't worrying about migration from Angular 1.x. He mentions AtScript and the guys discuss how it relates to TypeScript. Kevin asks if Google is the new Microsoft, in that everything has to be their way. K Scott says it's feeling like MEF composition.
  • (12:09) Scott K says he thinks the radical changes are to support components and dart. K Scott says he also sees that runtime introspection looks like an important goal.
  • (13:30) Scott K talks about the migration plans and the announcements that 1.x won't be getting any new features. Kevin says this puts Angular developers in a tough spot, because 2.0 isn't going to be out for a while and 1.3 is the final release in that branch. Scott K says he's stopped paying much attention to it for now while waiting for things to shake out. There's a discussion of Durandal now that Rob's left the Angular project.
• Wearables and the Microsoft Band
  • (17:30) Jon asks K Scott about his new Microsoft Band. K Scott says he likes the notifications and sleep notifications. Jon asks if the sleep notifications are actionable or just telling you things you already know; K Scott says he's notices that poor sleep for three nights in a row affect his communication skills.
  • (20:25) Jon says he hasn't been able to pull the trigger on Pebble, even on super sale, but the Band looks really interesting. The voice input for Cortana looks neat, too.
• Windows Phone interlude
  • (21:55) K Scott says he helped a friend pick out a Windows Phone and was impressed by the inexpensive models from Blu. Jon talks about how all the new Windows Phone models are nice inexpensive phones rather than flagship models. Jon mentions the app coverage and says that all the big apps seem to be available, the only ones he misses is an app from his bank to deposit checks.
  • (24:30) Kevin says it seems like Windows Phone is swimming upstream on apps, mentioning recent articles from Tom Warren and Ed Bott.
• Wrap up on wearables
  • (25:55) Jon asks Kevin what he's thinking on the Apple Watch. He says he's intrigued and wants to play with one to see.
  • (26:55) Scott K says there's not much you can really do on a tiny screen, so consuming content on a watch is silly. Jon says that he sees room for things like two-way communication and remotely controlling the desktop. Scott K says his Pebble is kind of like a second screen for his phone. He says there isn't enough horsepower on a watch for voice recognition, but the other guys all jump in to say that the watches use Bluetooth to work with the voice recognition on their phones and it all works pretty well.
• Kickstarter
  • (32:15) Jon says he's backed ten projects, but only three of them really turned out well: gourmet marshmallows, a web-based font creation program called Prototypo, and a file manager called OneCommander. Scott's had good success because he does some due diligence on the shipping background for the creators.
  • (35:15) Scott says he avoids tech projects on Kickstarter because he knows geeks, and he knows the overestimate what they can do: they all think they're physicists, nutritionists, lawyers... they think they know everything, and they don't anticipate the cost and effort to go from prototype to shipping product. Jon says he's seen two software projects that were flawlessly executed - BitCommander (since renamed to OneCommander) and Prototypo. In both cases the creators were very communicative throughout the project.
  • (39:55) Kevin's never Kickstarted anything because he doesn't want more things. Jon says he usually backs things because he wants to support someone doing something cool, not because he wants a project. He says he frequently sees popular new technology Kickstarters that are recreating something he can find already shipping on Amazon for a lot less. Kevin says he finds the whole Kickstarter thing is completely fascinating, and he's amazed that it seems to work. Scott K talks about how many game manufacturers use it to figure out how many to produce rather than to start figuring out how to produce a project. Jon mentions a Sony epaper watch that was Kickstarted just to gage interest and says that the goal of Kickstarter is to actually graduate to shipping product and lists a few; Kevin talks about the Veronica Mars movie.
• Containers
  • (47:20) Jon talks about Docker and Rocket and asks if the guys are using them yet. Kevin says that poor OSX support (requiring VirtualBox Boot2Docker) has cooled the interest in Docker in his shop.
  • (48:55) Jon says he thinks the container approach seems like a nice middle ground between running a native process and a full virtual machine. He says that he'd like to talk to the Spoon team soon to hear about their Windows native container system.
  • (51:15) Scott K talks about the Mesos system - a distributed systems kernel. Jon searches around and finds it's an Apache project. The idea is that you can move your Linux applications over to it, then scale across commodity hardware. Jon worries about the latency but figures eventually you overcome latency with processing power if it's distributed right.
• Women In Computers, Old
  • (55:05) Scott mentions an article about Margaret Hamilton, the software engineer who wrote the code for the Apollo Eleven and came up with the term hardware engineer. Scott says that the Apollo source code is up on Google Code.
  • (56:45 )Jon talks about an article he saw about the programmers who wrote code for the Colossus in World War Two, and they were all women. Kevin says he saw an article about how until the early '80's the distribution was even until there was an advertising campaign that was geared to boys, and things changes after that.
  • (58:20) Scott talks about an article he read about The Sotry of Mel, who was working so close to the metal that he optimized for where the memory would be located on the physical memory drum.

Show Links:

• io.js
• Rob Eisenberg: Leaving Angular
• Prototypo
• OneCommander
• Tom Warren: I've given up on Windows Phone
• Spoon
• Mesos
• Margaret Hamilton
• Apollo source code
• When Women Stopped Coding
• The Story of Mel

Episode 199

Jon talks to Rob Reynolds about how Chocolatey has grown over the past few years, how OneGet fits in, and the Chocolatey Kickstarter.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 199: Rob Reynolds on the Chocolatey Kickstarter, Chocolatey growth and OneGet

Show Notes:

• The state of the Chocolatey
  • (00:19) Rob explains what Chocolatey is and compares it to package managers on other platforms. Jon talks about how he uses Chocolatey to install all his programs every time he installs Windows.
  • (02:10) Rob talks about how Chocolatey has grown in the past 3 1/2 years.
• Package Moderation
  • (02:24) Rob explains how package moderation works - whereas previously all packages were immediately published and reviewed later, now they're reviewed by moderators before they're listed. One common fix is just getting the naming right.
  • (05:24) Rob talks about how they're curating the community feed. They're currently in a grace period until December 1; some packages are that aren't broadly applicable are being told to move to MyGet. Jon and Rob talk about other hosting options (anything that host NuGet) and benefits of using the NuGet infrastructure underneath Chocolatey.
  • (07:25) Rob talks about the checksumming features they've added.
• Chocolatey Pro
  • (09:03) Rob explains how Chocolatey has grown, partly due to the OneGet announcement - they're up to 7 million downloads now, half of them in the past six months. He talks about how the costs have grown over that time.
  • (11:40) Rob explains what the Kickstarter supports. The free / open source version will always be free. They're also adding in professional-only feeds and a content delivery network to support the professional feeds. Jon asks and Rob explains the professional feeds work.
  • (14:50) Rob explains how the pro version includes additional virus checking via Virus Total.
  • (15:31) Jon says it sounds like most of the money is to provide for infrastructure. Rob agrees, but says some will help buy him some time to work on it. He talks about the example of Octopus Deploy - development has really accelerated since it became a full-time endeavor.
• OneGet
  • (17:05) Jon asks what OneGet is. Rob explains that it's a package manager aggregator and works with the Chocolatey feed right out of the box. Rob and Jon talk about the advantages of having Chocolatey support installed in Windows.
  • (20:20) Jon asks about the impact to the Chocolatey team. Rob clarifies that they're a provider, so they build the hooks, and OneGet will read directly from their feed.
• Windows Store
  • (21:02) Jon asks if Rob's worried that the Windows Store will someday add Win32 app support and make Chocolatey irrelevant. Rob says he doesn't expect it, but even if they did there are some big differences between a store and a package manager. Jon and Rob discuss package managers, meta-packages, dependency management and package uninstallation.
• Kickstarter Benefits
  • (24:36) Jon asks Rob to explain the different Kickstarter award levels. Rob discusses Chocolatey Pro pricing and some of the higher level awards like a custom workshop. He points out that the pricing is perpetual for business accounts, so by backing the Kickstarter you're locking in the price.
  • (29:00) Jon says that even if you don't care about the rewards, if you've been using Chocolatey you should consider supporting the project. Rob describes why they came up with their goal amount, including the Kickstarter and Amazon transaction fees.
• Wrap-up
  • (21:29) Rob and Jon mention ways you can get involved. Of course you can back the Kickstarter, but he's also really appreciate any press or exposure.

Show Links:

• Chocolatey.org
• Rob Reynolds @ferventcoder
• http://bit.ly/chocolateykickstarter

Episode 198

The guys talk to ASP.NET team member Damian Edwards about ASP.NET vNext (the next version of ASP.NET), Tag Helpers, and what's new with SignalR.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 198: Damian Edwards on ASP.NET vNext, Tag Helpers and SignalR

Show Notes:

• Hello. What is ASP.NET vNext?
• (00:18) ASP.NET vNext is the next version of ASP.NET. It's not just ASP.NET MVC 6 or Web API 3, it's a total rethink of the ASP.NET platform. In some ways, it's a bigger change than the move from classic ASP to ASP.NET. In other ways, it can be pretty seamless depending on what you're doing.
• (01:29) Jon asks Damian to talk about what's crazy and brand new. Damian describes the full stack in a web application, from the operating system up to the code that you write in your application and the libraries you bring in. Starting at the bottom of the stack, ASP.NET vNext is cross platform, meaning it will work and be supported on Linux and Mac.
• Cross platform
• (02:36) Jon asks Damian to clarify what that means - is it supported cross-platform, or does it just kind of work? Damian says that it's first class support - they'll ensure that it works cross-platform, there will be cross-platform documentation, and there will be cross-platform tooling (Damian mentions the Sublime plugin for ASP.NET vNext). They'll support building and deploying ASP.NET vNext applications cross-platform.
• Core CLR
• (03:41) Damian continues up the stack, talking about how .NET framework is booted up. In vNext, there is a native code custom CLR loader that is decoupled form the operating system's .NET loader. Even when you're running on Windows, you're not relying on the standard .NET loading mechanism.
• (05:56) Jon mentions having seen demos where code was written on one laptop, copied onto a USB drive, and executed on another laptop, asking if the custom .NET loader is what makes that work. Damian explains that's half of why it works - the next layer of the platform is the managed runtime itself, which is the other half of the magic. There is a new CLR based on core CLR. Damian explains how the .NET runtime runs on a core CLR and the base class libraries. The core CLR is based on the .NET CLR for Silverlight - it was already a lightweight version that ran cross-platform. There are now two options for the CLR you can run on - the full .NET CLR, or the new "cloud optimized" CLR. It's important because it's smaller - so small that it can be deployed with your application. Also, because it can be self-contained, multiple versions can run on the same server.
• (10:01) Scott K asks what prevents bundling the entire application up into a single EXE. Damian talks about how .NET Native is being used in Windows Store applications and says they're intending to look at that for ASP.NET vNext in the future. For now they're achieving isolation by shipping the core CLR and libraries as NuGet dependencies.
• (12:30) Scott K asks if you need to have the .NET framework installed at all if you're running ASP.NET vNext. Damian says no, and if .NET is installed it has no bearing on your application.
• (12:12) Jon asks how this affects IT shops that want full control over .NET framework installations on their servers. Damian says this question requires more context on what administrators would be afraid of. He describes how ASP.NET vNext will support servicing, so any urgent vulnerabilities can be patched globally on a server.
• How does this affect existing apps? What changes?
• (14:50) K Scott brings up a Twitter question from James on how this will affect ASP.NET MVC and Web API applications. Damian says that ASP.NET MVC 6 will include both ASP.NET MVC and Web API. Damian explains how ASP.NET MVC is on version 5 and there are some things they'd do differently today. It also previously depended on System.Web, which dates all the way back to before 2000. ASP.NET MVC 6 has DI built in. It's OWIN compatible, so you can run it on any OWIN compatible server and run any OWIN middleware. Global configuration (web.config and System.Configuration) are gone, replaced by code-based configuration influenced by Katana. There's also Entity Framework 7, which is a complete rewrite that doesn't have ObjectContext or System.Entity - instead it makes model first (DbContext) foundational. EF7 also works with non-relational databases. If you have an existing application with ASP.NET MVC 5 or Web API 2, it should port over pretty seamlessly as long as you're not working directly with underlying components like System.Web or HttpContext.
• Development experience
• (19:39) Scott K asks about the development experience - will this work in a new Visual Studio version, or can he just create applications in a text editor? Damian says both will work. This both allows cross-platform development and a more flexible development stack, allowing for things like cloud-based development. Of course, ASP.NET will work work great on Visual Studio. They use Roslyn to do all the code compilation either at design or compile time. This allows for deploying the entire application as source, and eliminates the need for a separate compile step during development (since the code is constantly being compiled as you work).
• (25:15) K Scott asks how much churn he should expect if he starts developing with ASP.NET vNext today. Damian says there's a lot of churn still right now. It won't release until well into next year some time.
• Questions from Twitter
• (26:34) Iris Classon asks what features they weren't able to include that they'd have liked to. Damian says it's too early to answer that question, since they're still in pretty early development.
• (27:00) Iris Classon also asks where they looked for inspiration. Damian mentions web frameworks like Rails and Node as well as module loading in Java.
• (27:38) Ben Maddox asks how Damian sees this improving the feedback loop for code, UI and tests. Damian says it speeds up UI feedback since all of your code is compiled as you type it and continuous testing is enabled due to the continuous compile. Both are available today with other tools or things you set up yourself, but it will be simpler in future.
• (28:55) Steen R. asks when we'll see cross-platform Visual Studio. Damian says there are no plans he's privy to.
• (29:05) Filip Woj. asks if F# will have first class support - released and supported. Damian says not for version one, although there are demonstrations of F# providers.
• (30:40) Steen R. asks how webroot will work in practice. Damian describes how webroot works - it's a separate directory from which your application is served. Any files not in the webroot folder will not be served by the web server. Your application or uploads folders will be separate from your webroot, so they can't be served.
• Portable areas?
• (33:49) K Scott asks about portable areas. Damian says he's not aware of something like that for ASP.NET MVC.
• Tag Helpers
• (35:18) Jon asks what tag helpers are. Damian describes how Razor is a templating language that's designed to allow mixing C# and HTML. It falls down a bit when you're using HTML Helpers and want to change the output - for instance, if you want to pass in an HTML class to an element. C# gets in the way due to things like class being a reserved word, and you miss out on any HTML IntelliSense or HTML editor smarts, because you're just working with C# strings. Tag helpers allow you to just write HTML tags with attributes that Razor understands. These can do things like access the model metadata to emit appropriate form HTML.
• (41:27) K Scott asks when he can start using it. Damian says that it's in a separate feature branch now and explains how to use them and says you can ping Taylor Mullen for help - or just wait a few weeks and it'll be in the main branch.
• (42:59) Jon comments on how the Spark view engine provided something similar, and Damian says that Lou works right next to him and has helped with the design. They're not trying to change the core of how Razor works or feels, just make it easier to work with HTML helpers.
• SignalR
• (44:10) Jon asks what's new with SignalR. Damian runs down some of the recent releases and mentions SignalR 3 for ASP.NET vNext. He also mentions the C++ client that's currently in development.
• (45:28) Jon asks if ASP.NET vNext makes some things simpler for SignalR. Damian says the main impact is that things like configuration and tracing are now shared between components like Web API and MVC.
• Wrap Up
  • (46:56) Jon asks Damian what's coming up for him. Damian mentions some of the talks he'll be doing at NDC London, including load testing SignalR and ASP.NET vNext.
  • (47:50) Jon asks Damian how people can keep up with ASP.NET vNext, mentioning the asp.net/vnext page. Damian also recommends the weekly ASP.NET vNext Community Standup meetings, being run as a public weekly Google Hangout hosted by Scott Hanselman and Jon Galloway.

Show Links:

• Damian Edwards (blog @damianedwards)
• ASP.NET vNext
• ASP.NET vNext Weekly Community Standup
• ASP.NET vNext on GitHub
• Tag Helpers feature branch
• ASP.NET SignalR
• SignalR on GitHub
• SignalR release notes
• Herding Code 145 - NDC Cage Match with Rob Conery (node.js/socket.io) and Damian Edwards (SignalR)

Episode 197

It's time for a discussion show!

Download / Listen: Herding Code 197 - Summer Stories, C# 6, Vim and Atom, Terrible Keyboards, Poorly Aged Hipster Code, React and the Apple Watch

Show Notes:

• (01:22) What's new for Kevin? Node, Backbone, working at Brandcast, some talk about how the shop runs. Plus he's been busy moving.
• (03:12) What's new for K Scott? Lots of JavaScript, C# / MVC, AngularJS, MongoDB. Jon asks how Mongo is working in production in the healthcare application K Scott had mentioned earlier. K Scott talks about some performance issues he's looked at, including some that came down to C# queries, and an issue with a 16MB document size limit. Jon asks if they're using Redis or other front end caching outside of Mongo. K Scott says they're just map-reducing and storing the information in other collections. He's not travelling quite as much
• (06:50) Jon asks K Scott about his recent posts on C# 6 and EcmaScript 6. K Scott talks about looking into traceur to write current code today in ES6, compiling to ES5 to work in current browsers.
• (07:25) Jon asks K Scott about his recent C# posts on property initializers and primary constructors. K Scott talks about those as well as the new "using static" feature to invoke static members without needing to use the type name.
• (08:42) Scott K mentions a discussion about required properties with property initializers. K Scott says he was hesitant about a few things with the new syntax, and problem being that there's no initializer body for validation. You can mitigate that a little using an assert in a the initializer. It's nice not having to write explicit setters.
• (11:06) Scott K says he doesn't even think about property syntax all that much because Resharper and CodeRush handle that for him. Jon speculates how long it will take for Resharper to start yelling at him to use primary constructors everywhere. Scott K says he uses CodeRush for that reason and turns off the code hints.
• (12:27) K Scott asks what software Kevin is using: OSX and MacVim.
• (12:40) Jon asks if anyone's using Atom.io. Scott K says he tried it and it was way too slow. Kevin says that after using Vim he has a hard time with heavy IDE's - even WebStorm. He's skeptical about the longevity of new code editors, while Vim is eternal. Jon says he's interested in Atom.io because it's cross-platform and open source.
• (16:05) What's new for Jon? He's been doing some courses for Microsoft Virtual Academy - Introduction to ASP.NET MVC and a Bootstrap course including some advanced stuff like Bootstrap Mix-ins. Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC book is out. He went to Norway for fun and went to pulpit rock. He's been spending some more time on non-Microsoft web stacks and platforms now that Azure and ASP.NET vNext are cross-platform. Scott K and Kevin talk about the fun of switching operating systems and remembering keyboard shortcuts. Jon says the biggest frustration is that he keeps trying to touch the screen on a MacBook and it doesn't do anything.
• (21:30) What's New for Scott K? He got a new computer a Lenovo U530 - he calls it the consumer version of the Carbon. He talks about some of the confusing things about the Lenovo keyboard, especially the function keys. Everyone talks about function keys and keyboard problems. K Scott has a newer Carbon, and the keyboard is driving him nuts. Scott K says he's constantly hitting the touchpad because his keyboard is off-center, which always brings up the Windows charms. Jon mentions touchfreeze and other ways of disabling the touchpad while typing. Jon says he rarely uses the touchpad because he just uses the touchscreen. Scott says he never uses it, he thinks it's weird that you use two fingers to scroll on the touchpad and one on the screen. K Scott said he accidentally put his Carbon in caps lock, but he doesn't have a caps lock button so it was hard to turn off. Kevin is unhappy with the Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard's function keys. Everyone, please stop messing up the function keys.
• (34:13) Jon asks if anyone's use the CODE keyboard. He and Jon both agree that it looks great, but they can't use non-ergo keyboards. Scott K wants keyboards to keep it simple and last a long time.
• (35:27) Scott K get back to telling us about his summer activities. He was working on upgrading a MonoRail that drove him crazy due to being "craftstmanned up" with lots of opinions in the code like fluent extension methods, Brails view engines and difficulty in upgrading libraries due to dependency injection and breaking changes in NHibernate. Jon says that he's developed an aversion to things that make great blog posts but will be hard to work with in a few years. Scott K says 90% of the problems came from strong naming - binding redirects and ILMerge with aliases didn't help. They've been evaluating MongoDb and AngularJS a bit at work
• (41:50) Scott K used React with Grunt in his MonoRail project to allow him to add client-side functionality into a frightening legacy application. Jon asks how he sets it up so it works at dev time and Scott K explains. Kevin's been hearing a lot about React lately. Scott K like that it's not trying to be MVC, just the V - e.g. no two-way binding - and the virtual DOM diffing is so fast that people are even using it with AngularJS and Ember just to speed up diffing large lists. Plus it's used by Facebook for Instagram and the commenting / messenging on Facebook, so it's been proven to work in big apps. He thinks it's going to be bigger than Angular and Ember in the next few years.
• Lightning round
• (46:34) Who's getting the new Apple Watch? Kevin says it seems iPad 1-ish. Jon likes some things about the watch UI, including the automatic answer prompts from instant messages with questions. He says the Moto 360 looks better, and we haven't heard anything about battery life. He's not sure what he'd do with today's smart watches, but hopes watches will be really cool in a few years. Jon doesn't like all the proprietary stuff - payment, chargers, etc. Scott K says he could easily switch to Android and it wouldn't bother him, so he's not going to be getting the new iPhone. He's got a Pebble and likes the notifications and battery life. He thinks the Apple Watch is too little too late. He thinks everything from Apple has gone downhill post-Jobs. He also talks about his recent laptop purchase - if he wanted a posix system, he'd rather just buy a laptop and put Linux on it. He starts ranting about npm and K Scott cuts him off. But then the guys start complaining about the live stream and things go off the rails again.
• (1:02:32) Jon asks why nobody's moved to CouchDb. K Scott says the company behind MongoDb is pretty pushy. Nobody had looked at DocumentDb yet, and both Kevin and Scott K are bullish on Postgres.

Show Links:

• Traceur compiler
• C# 6.0 Features Part I : Property Initializers
• C# 6.0 Features Part II : Primary Constructors
• C# 6.0 Features Part 3: Declaration Expressions
• The Features of ES6 Part 1: Let
• Two free video courses: Intro to ASP.NET MVC and Responsive UI with Bootstrap
• touchfreeze
• MonoRail
• React

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Episode 196

The guys talk to AngularJS committer Matias Niemela about AngularJS and Angular animations with ngAnimate.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 196: Matias Niemela on ngAnimate

Show Notes:

• Hello. How'd you get started with AngularJS and ngAnimate?
  • (01:00) K Scott notes a tweet from Matias that he liked Angular before it was popular and asks Matias about how he got started with Angular and how he became a contributor, primarily contributing to animation. He's also contributed to angular-dart and forms. (03:17) K Scott asks about the history of Animations. Matias talks about how things evolved to working with CSS classes. K Scott talks about how he found the source code for animations was pretty interesting, and Matias agrees.
• Dart and Google Material Design
  • (04:47) K Scott asks about AngularDart relates to Angular. Matias explains that both are from Google, and they want to make sure that it's easy to build Angular applications using Dart if you want to.
  • (05:39) Jon asks is Matias is working in both the 1.x and 2.0 source. Matias says he's mostly focused on the 1.2 and 1.3 release and lately incorporating Google's new Material Design, especially with animations and components. Angular Material Design includes styles and animations, but is built to allow you hooks to add your own styles and animations, transparently syncing them together in a consistent way.
• Animation internals
• (08:14) K Scott asks for Matias' thoughts on CSS Animations. Matias says the API is too isolated, so there's no way to hook into the keyframe system. CSS Transitions do allow for that, but you can't repeat transitions. Putting them together, it's difficult to create a comprehensive system that's guaranteed to always run. The Material Design animations work with the Web Animations API, which is a more robust animations API. Currently only Chrome support the .animate method, and the Web Animations API spec is still being written, but Polymer has a polyfill.
• (10:16) Jon asks about browser support and whether Matias is able to write to standards or if he has to do a lot of special casing. Matias says that the Polymer polyfill and the animations API covers almost everything without special casing.
• (11:11) K Scott asks what the most challenging part of Angular Matias has worked on so far. Matias says the challenge has been the animations, especially in refactoring over time.
• Testing in JavaScript
• (12:56) K Scott asks how Matias tests animations. He says that the tests are all mocked, so they're not running against animation engines. He says it's been difficult testing asynchronous code in a synchronous manner.
• (14:38) Jon asks if Matias uses Javascript libraries to deal with asynchronous code. Matias says that's all handled by Angular itself.
• ECMAScript 6
• (15:15) K Scott asks for Matias' thoughts on ECMAScript 6. Matias says that Angular 2 is built with ECMAScript 6 using traceur for backward compatibility. He likes the classes and generators an syntactic features, but after working with Dart there are a lot of other features he's missing. The problem is that JavaScript is non-blocking, so the code will always be a series of callbacks with variables to see if a callback has fired. Promises are great, but they're just packaged callbacks in a way.
• Getting Started, Form Validation
• (16:50) Jon asks for pointers for someone who's new to ngAnimate. Matias says he's written documentation for 1.2, but some of it isn't up to date. There's a SitePoint article about it, and when 1.3 is out Matias will have an article out about it.
• (17:38) K Scott asks about form validation. Matias talks about the work they've been doing with forms in 1.3.
• ECMAScript 6 and JavaScript Development
• (18:55) Twitter question from Steve Strong asked for news on Angular 2.0 and how important ECMAScript 6 is to it. Matias talks about how ES6+ (ES6 with annotations support) simplify dependency injection.
• (21:13) K Scott asks if Matias liked using JavaScript back when he was doing more full stack development. Matias talks about how he used to write a lot of JavaScript to do things that Angular just handles.
• (22:38) K Scott says that Matias' blog and twitter names, Year Of Moo, made him thing that Matias might have been involved with Moo Tools. Matias says he used to be heavily invested in Moo Tools because it supported proper object oriented programming (as opposed to jQuery's looser approach). He eventually switched to jQuery and then to Angular. He'd originally named his blog around an idea of writing a new Moo Tools plugin each month for a year, but kept the name because it's unique.
• More Testing
• (23:50) K Scott asks Matias when he became passionate about testing. He talks about how valuable tests have been to him.
• (24:45) Jon asks if Matias has any recommendations on testing. His suggestion is to pay attention to what you're after. Your tests are to make sure that the code you've written work, so test the main points of functionality. Look for friction points - things that will not change - and test those. Try to write some of your own unit tests first, and when you get frustrated look at how projects like Angular are writing their tests.
• Inspiration and Design
• (26:12) K Scott asks Matias what he's been looking to for inspiration. Matias has lately inspired by Clojure and books on software patterns and refactoring.
• (26:51) Jon asks Matias about his site's design and use of color. Matias says the cartoons on his site are by his girlfriend who is a graphic designer. He says that most technical bloggers are not focused on writing articles. His goal is to push the boundaries of technical blogging and to address the frustrations he's had in reading other technical blogs.
• (28:41) Jon says he really likes Matias' use of multiple em classes with different colors. Matias discusses that, and says that he's rewriting the website from Jeckyl to Hugo (which is built with Go).
• Wrap up
• (29:58) K Scott asks what Matias does for fun. He mentions travel (he's from Finland), golf and going to the gym. But computers is a big passion of his, so it's rare that he's away from the computer.
• (30:28) K Scott says he used to play golf a lot, but he's been making an effort to get out golfing at least once a week. Matias says it's definitely a challenge a lot of programmers face - most of us like what we do, and going outside requires intention. Jon talks about his friends in other professions who leave their work at work. Matias talks about the portability aspect of computing.
• (32:24) K Scott asks Matias about what's on the way for for him. He mentions some posts and upcoming speaking engagements, especially ngEurope in October in Paris, talking about what's new with Angular and ngAnimate.

Show Links:

• Matias Niemela (http://yearofmoo.com/,  @yearofmoo)
• Angular Material Design examples
• Traceur compiler
• ngAnimations post series (currently covers ngAnimate 1.2)
• Adding CSS Animations to AngularJS Applications (SitePoint)
• ng-europe (October 22-23, Paris)

Sponsor

This show is brought to you by Runscope - find out more at http://runscope.com/herdingcode

Episode 195

The guys talk to Michael Mahemoff about Player FM, a cloud based podcast application which is focused on discovery and multi-device synchronization that he recently showed off at Google I/O.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 195: Michael Mahemoff on Player FM

Show Notes:

• Hello. What is Player FM?
• (00:48) K Scott asks Mike for a quick introduction. Mike has studies both psychology and software engineering and has worked on a variety of applications, focusing lately on HTML5 web applications. He's been working for the past few years on Player FM, a cloud based podcast application which is focused on discovery and multi-device synchronization.
• (01:55) K Scott asks about the technologies used to build Player FM. Mike talks about the advantages of moving feed fetching to the cloud, the web site (using a PJAX implementation which pushes markup rather than data and HTML5 history) and an API.
• Player FM API
• (04:33) K Scott asks more about the API. The server is running Ruby on Rails using controllers that supply different format based on the extension in URL. The API is publicly available for experimentation but isn't officially supported. Mike's set up using a spectrum of detail levels (none, id, medium and full) rather than allowing clients to select specific fields. This allows you to be efficient in your API requests for hierarchies but is still cachable. He's created a framework to support that.
• (09:10) Jon mentions some of the URLs he's seeing in browsing the API for listeners who want to play along at home. He asks Mike about the balance of a self documenting API vs the full hypermedia smart client approach. Mike says he thinks the API needs to be pretty mature for that to work and points out some of the curated lists in the feed.
• (11:33) K Scott asks if the curation is community based. Mike says that's the eventual goal, but for now he's doing that.
• (12:23) K Scott asks about the difficulty in tracking when all the feeds have been last updated. Mike says that originally it was a simple loop using feedzilla. Now it's using sidekick and the PubSubHubbub standard (using the superfeeder service and webhooks). The clients are still polling now, but he's going to be updating the clients to use Google Cloud Messaging (on Android) and iCloud Messaging (on Apple) so the updates will be realtime from publisher to client.
• Native clients for Android and iOS
• (14:30) K Scott asks if Mike's building native clients. Mike says the iOS client is still in development and the Android app is native. K Scott says he's wanted to do some Android dev but it's always seemed like the most difficult platform. Mike says that it's gotten easier lately due to the new application services and gives an example of the Google Wear Services. Jon asks for some more info on the Google Wear integration and Mike explains how any media framework application automatically gets some support, and they've extended it to create a phone application to allow episode browsing on the watch.
• (17:15) K Scott says he was surprised by Mike's blog post about the demand for Chromecast support for audio applications and asks about the work required to build that support. Mike explains the API integration and says that the hardest part was complying with the look and feel guidelines.
• Advanced podcast support with Podlove
• (20:02) Jon asks if there are things that podcasts can add to enable podcast applications to give a better experience. Mike talks about emerging standards like Podlove which adds support for chapters, time based links, attributions and related feeds. Jon says he's been including timestamps in the show notes for a while so that seems pretty easy to implement. Mike talks about how TimeJump and Podlove could allow for deep linking into content.
• (22:18) K Scott asks what's been frustrating in dealing with feeds. Mike talks about the difficulty in feed parsing and the differing standards and implementations. Jon says he's always just used Feedburner. Mike likes Feedburner and appreciates the built-in support for PubSubHubbub and would like to see Google pay more attention to it.
• Misc: Business plan, mobile web support and Google I/O
• (24:24) K Scott asks if Player FM is Mike's full time job. Mike says it is. They're not monetizing it yet, but he's building out a freemium service with advanced features like unlimited subscriptions and advanced syncing across devices.
• (26:16) Jon asks if Mike has plans for a Windows Phone application. Mike says he'd love to support it eventually, but right now his support for other platforms is via the mobile optimized website and the Player FM feeds.
• (27:06) K Scott asks about Mike's experience in bringing Player FM to Google I/O. Mike talks about the experience - it was his 4th Google I/O, and he's been both an attendee and speaker in the past, but this time he was too busy to attend.
• User Experience
• (28:43) K Scott asks how Mike's psychology degree has helped him in software development. Mike talks about the applications in user interface design and machine learning. Jon asks about Mikes thesis about human computer interaction; Mike talks about user interface design patterns for consistency.
• (32:20) K Scott says he's happy the Player FM site doesn't use the ubiquitous cheeseburger menu. Mike talks about some of the UI design features in the web application.
• API Optimization
• (33:19) K Scott asks about optimizations in the API. Mike talks about timestamps in the API responses so the mobile applications can keep aware of which channels have been updated and get the responses from edge servers.
• (36:10) Jon asks about using JSON LD and E-Tags. Mike says he hasn't needed that since he's building the clients and they're doing the same checking.
• (37:39) Jon asks how Cloudflare has worked for Mike. Mike says it's been great, but there were a few surprises like caching of error responses.
• (38:40) K Scott asks if it's possible to remove things from the cache. Mike explains some of the options. Jon talks about some of the difficulties in diagnosing content problems when you've got multiple levels of caching and Mike agrees that it'd be nice if there were some visibility via HTTP headers.
• Search and Discovery
• (40:48) Jon asks if Player FM has additional markup to light up in search results. Mike says they were one of the early sites to be included in the Google app indexing setup, which supports deep linking in Android applications.
• (42:30) K Scott says he's looking forward to the recommendation features and Mike describes some of the things they're including.
• (43:30) Mike talks about Player FM support for full text search using Elastic Search to allow for easier discovery.
• (44:25) Kevin asks if transcripts could be included in the full text search. Mike talks about some of the standards support.
• Wrap Up
• (45:49) K Scott asks what Mike does when he's not working on Player FM.
• (46:47) K Scott asks Mike what's coming up for him in the near future. Mike talks about some Player FM features he's excited about working on like intelligent discovery, collaborative filtering, server-side play tracking, analytics and platform support including an desktop form factor that will work offline. The desktop application is based on an open source project they're working on that will compile a Chrome application and cross-compile native applications for Windows, Apple and Linux (based on node webkit).
• (48:20) K Scott asks for any last words; Mike says he's happy for any questions at [email protected].

Show Links:

• Michael Mahemoff (http://mahemoff.com/,  @mahemoff)
• Player FM
• Design, Develop And Distribute: Player FM At Google IO Developer Sandbox
• Podlove Projects
• PubSubHubbub
• JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data)
• UI Patterns

Sponsor

This show is brought to you by Runscope - find out more at http://runscope.com/herdingcode

Episode 194

The guys talk to Hadi Hariri about Kotlin, Nitra, and his NDC talk, Developing In A Decade.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 194: Hadi Hariri on Kotlin

Show Notes:

• Hello. What is Kotlin?
  • (01:00) K Scott asks what Kotlin is. Hadi explains it's a statically type programming language that targets the JVM and JavaScript, and that it was designed to serve the needs of the JetBrains development team: Let's create a language that a language that we can use ourselves... and if other people want to use it then, awesome.
  • (03:07) K. Scott asks about the source code. It's on Github and it's under Apache 2 license. He asks who in their right mind these days would design a closed source language *cough* Swift *cough*.
  • (03:48) Jon asks about comparisons with the Swift language. Hadi comments and says both Kotlin and Swift are kind of similar to Groovy. Jon asks why not just use Groovy then, and Hadi says that they wanted a statically typed language.
  • (05:32) K. Scott asks about the comparisons with Scala and Java. Hadi says that Kotlin is more restrictive than Scala in some cases, which they see as a benefit. They strive for 100% interoperability with Java, since they have 14 years of existing Java source code to work with.
  • (08:15) K. Scott asks about the JavaScript story. Hadi says it was bound to happen eventually, so they just did it from the source. The benefit is that you can share source code between server and client.
  • (11:44) K. Scott asks about .NET support in the roadmap. Hadi says it's not likely soon. He says there's a ton of activity on the JVM lately, and it runs everywhere, albeit with the Ask toolbar.
  • (13:31) Jon asks about running Java code on Mono and .NET using IKVM. Hadi says he's tried it on some prototypes and it works, but Scott K complains that it's really slow.
  • (14:33) Scott K. Asks about the use of inference. Hadi says one of the goals of Kotlin is to be very concise, so you very rarely need to declare types.
  • (17:43) K Scott asks if there are any libraries that JetBrains has for Kotlin. Hadi describes Kara, a web framework which makes use of strongly-typed HTML and CSS builders. Spec is a specification framework that Hadi's written. Kotlin is pretty popular for Android development, so there are a lot of Android helpers available.
  • (21:31) Jon asks about best places to get started with Kotlin. Hadi says it's very easy to get started with just the compiler, available from on the Kotlin site. For an IDE-centric experience, use IntelliJ (either the free OSS Community Edition Version or IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate). You can also use the browser-based Kotlin demo without downloading anything.
• Java
  • (23:06) Jon mentions installing Java JDK via Chocolatey, so as not to get the Ask toolbar. Hadi agrees and says that the Ask toolbar was from back in the Sun days, it's not an Oracle thing. Jon also asks about the Java browser plugin. There's a silly discussion about Java applets.
  • (26:44) Jon asks about Nitra. Hadi explains the difference between Nitra, Kotlin and MPS. MPS (Meta Programming System) is a language workbench to create new languages or extend existing ones running on the JVM. Kotlin is a separate language, but it's written in a way that makes it possible to easily create DSL's. Nitra is an open source tool built by the Nemerle team, who were hired by JetBrains. Nitra is similar to Roslyn - it's a generic tool that allows you to create a compiler for any language with support for tooling.
• Nitra
  • (30:36) Jon asks how Nitra is being used. Hadi says it's mostly used internally by JetBrains, and it's still really under development.
  • (32:45) Jon asks about the Nitra samples and Visual Studio extensions on GitHub. Hadi says you can start using them already, and that it does include Nemerle so you can start extending the with it now, but it won't provide tooling for the language you're building.
• Developing In A Decade
  • (33:38) K Scott asks about Hadi's talk at NDC called Developing in a Decade, looking ahead at technology and trends ten years from now. Hadi says he's not so much looking at how or what we'll be doing, but why we'll be doing it. He says that he sees an overemphasis on how many rounds of VC money a company gets as opposed to what they're actually doing. He's interested in things people are doing for social good, and he's concerned that we're being destructive without thinking about the effects.
  • (39:02) K Scott says that until recently when he called tech support, when he finally got to a person they could help him. Lately he's been finding that when he reaches a person, they're powerless to help him because the computers are in control. Hadi talks about how emerging technology like self driving cars will eliminate jobs.
  • (41:26) Jon ask Hadi if trends towards automation will have positive effects, such as creating content that wouldn't have previously been available or giving us more time to produce things we wouldn't have before. Hadi references Brave New World and Amusing Ourselves To Death, and says that the huge explosion of content has a negative effect. Scott K and Hadi talk about the numbing effect of news as entertainment.
• Parting Shot
  • (48:25) Hadi says "I told you so" about the coming unification of Web API and MVC controllers.

Show Links:

• Hadi Hariri (blog, @hhariri)
• Project Kotlin
• Blog post: Getting Started with a Kotlin OSS Project
• Type-safe Groovy-style builders
• Blog: Nitra goes open source
• Kara Web Framework
• NDC video: Developing In A Decade
• Hadi's post about MVC and Web API controllers: With HTTP, your application is your API

Sponsor

This show is brought to you by Runscope - find out more at http://runscope.com/herdingcode

Episode 193

At Techorama 2014 (Belgium), Jon corners Mark Rendle for a few minutes to talk about his new startup, Zudio, "the Azure Cloud storage toolkit," his keynote on the History of Programming, and other minutia.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 193: Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, The History of Programming, and Simple.Data

Show Notes:

• History of Programming
  • (00:54) Jon asks Mark what the talk was about, and some of his personal favorite periods.
  • (01:53) Jon remarks that some of the joke terrible languages weren't much worse than the unintentionally terrible languages. Mark mentions Intercal, brainf*** and Malbolge as joke programming languages and IBM Cobol as the most unintentionally hilarious programming language.
• Zudio: The Azure Cloud Storage Toolkit
  • (02:55) Mark talks about how Zudio got started and where it's at. Zudio is a web based tool for managing Azure storage. It's great for a lot of users, especially PHP / Node / Java developers and in the enterprise. It's built with AngularJS and Typescript.
  • (04:37) Jon said he assumed it was just a simple table grid, but there are seem to be a lot more advanced features. Mark talks about the new enterprise model, which lets you control your user list through Azure Active Directory (which can be synchronized to on premises Active Directory), and you can assign different access rights to users and groups. There's also auditing and logging to track usage.
  • (05:29) Jon asks if he's specifically focused on storage. Mark talks about upcoming support for SQL databases, including Azure SQL, SQL VM's, ClearDB running MySQL, Oracle VM's, Postgres via VM, etc. that will show run queries and show results in a grid, list tables and views, etc. Jon compares it to phpMyAdmin, but Mark says it's for any database and deployed in the same datacenters, without you needing to spin up a web server. His stretch goal is to handle data migrations between different database systems.
• Angular and Typescript
  • (07:19) Jon says that Mark's been a fan of Angular and Typescript for a while and asks why he likes the combination so much. Mark says it feels like the data binding framework Microsoft's been trying to build since VB3.
  • (08:30) Jon asks why Typescript instead of just writing in JavaScript. Mark talks about the benefits of compile-time checking. Jon asks for some specific answers and Mark gives an example with services passed as parameters. Oh, and IntelliSense is handy, too. Mark uses DefinitelyTyped and some Bower packages that he maintains.
  • (10:24) Mark says that unlike most frameworks he's worked with, he's gotten to the end of a project using Angular and doesn't want to throw it out, so that's saying something.
• Simple.Web and Simple.Data
  • (11:33) Jon asks Mark what's going on with Simple.Web (a simple .NET web framework with attribute routing and dependency injection). Mark says that everything that had driven him to create Simple.Web has been added into ASP.NET vNext, so Simple.Web is pretty much done.
  • (14:50) Simple.Data is Mark's simple data access layer that leverages dynamic types and can work without any code changes against a lot of different databases.
  • (15:52) Jon asks why someone would use Simple.Data instead of Entity Framework. Mark explains how Simple.Data works really well in lightweight web frameworks; it's so simple you can code to it without IntelliSense.
  • (16:47) Mark is focused on updates to Simple.Data for use in Zudio, and will we working on more metadata, performance, and async support. He's looking at moving to async only and is interested in listener input on that.
• Wrap up
  • (18:13) Mark likes all the new stuff and thinks it's a good time to be a programmer.

Show Links:

• Mark Rendle (blog, @MarkRendle)
• Zudio
• Herding Code 106: Mark Rendle on Simple.Data
• History of Programming (NDC recording) 
• Programming languages
  • Malbolge
  • INTERCAL
  • brainf***
  • COBOL
• Simple.Web
• Simple.Data

Sponsor

This show is brought to you by Runscope - find out more at http://runscope.com/herdingcode

Episode 192

The guys talk to Jackson Harper about CodeReview, his iPad application for reviewing GitHub pull requests. As Jackson describes the episode on Twitter: "...hear me talk about: @johnsheehan, @codereviewapp, and my one weird trick for writing better code."

Download / Listen: Herding Code 192: Jackson Harper on the CodeReview iOS app

Show Notes:

• Hello. What is CodeReview?
  • (00:18) Kevin introduces Jackson and asks about CodeReview. Jackson talks about how he missed
  • (01:25) Kevin asks about some of the specific features in CodeReview.
  • (02:05) Jon asks what the CodeReview app adds to the mobile web experience on GitHub. One of the big features is that CodeReview allows for completely working completely disconnected.
• Nerdy Implementation Details
  • (04:10) Kevin asks if Jackson's working against the GitHub API's. Jackson says he debated working using Git directly, but so far he's been using the GitHub API. Internally the code is abstracted so in theory it could work against other source code hosts like CodePlex. There's a brief discussion of Google Glass
  • (05:45) Jon asks about Jackson's development stack. Jackson says he's working directly in Objective-C and some C as well for the Markdown parser. There's some discussion of the joy of writing parsers in C. Jackson talks about how some old formats like diff are so much simpler to parse than even newer formats like XML and JSON.
  • (08:15) Jon asks why Jackson didn't use Mono for this application. Jackson says he's writing Objective-C for his day job, so it's good for him to write as much Objective-C as possible. Kevin said it seemed like working with Mono would require learning Objective-C to read the documentation. Jackson agrees, but says that learning the iOS APIs using Mono made the transition a lot easier for him.
  • (10:46) Jon asks about the BetterFetch feature. Jackson talks about he'd originally modeled the application more like a Twitter stream, so he'd been using the stream API. Over time, it became obvious that an e-mail client was a better application model, so he's moved off the steam API.
• Business Model and Pricing
  • (12:47) Jon asks about the business model and pricing. Jackson said he and JB originally thought that they'd use a freemium model, but they figured out that it really was more applicable for business users who can't as easily do in-app purchasing. He's switched to a flat rate to allow for group purchases and generally work better for business scenarios. Kevin says $20 is pretty steep for an app, but Jon says it says it seems completely reasonable for the right application with one of his favorite Android applications which cost $20. Jackson says it's a perpetual license, iPad apps often sell for a little more, and since it offers a lot of value to businesses he thinks it's worth it. They'd originally looked at $4.99, but that's hard to make any money off. Jon says he thinks that the price sensitivity between $4.99 and $19.99 is probably a lot less than between free and 99 cents. Jackson says he wants to sell and support a quality application that's sustainable.
• Services? Nope, just more repos.
  • (18:03) Kevin asks if it's all run off GitHub or if there are some hosted background services. Jackson says it's all running off GitHub. He supports storing additional profile data in an optional GitHub repository. Since he knows you'll have a GitHub application, he can include support for retina quality profile images (and potentially other information) stored in GitHub.
• Design issues
  • (20:54) Kevin asks if he's been working with a designer or doing it himself. Jackson talks about how he's worked with a few designers and it's really helped.
  • (22:50) Kevin asks if the application's design reflects GitHub's design. Jackson says it's similar, but explains some important differences between the application and the website.
  • (24:27) Jon asks about the full screen experience. Jackson explains how it both frees up screen real estate and allows you to focus.
• Code Reviews and Separating the Creative and Editorial Process
  • (25:24) Twitter question from Elijah Manor: "Do you use the CodeReview app to review code for the app itself?" Jackson says yes and explains how a bit inspiration for the application was Stephen King's writing workflow: bang out a bunch of pages in the morning, edit in the evening. Separating the creation and refining steps allow for a lot more productivity. Jon's very interested and asks Jackson for tips on how to do that. Jackson talks about setting small goals and working in a coffeeshop without bringing his power adapter, so he's constrained on time and internet use. K. Scott says that the iPad form factor probably helps for this, and Jackson agrees - he sees it as really good for focus.
  • (30:41) Jon asks if there are other features he could add by gathering intelligence about my codebase and workflow. Jackson mentions some ideas like hotspots and detecting patch impact. He's been watching GitHub's career page hoping to see that they'll be hiring data scientists to start providing this kind of information.  Jon agrees that it'd be great for GitHub to start investing in data science. Jackson says that you could get a pretty good start on patch impact just by manually flagging a few files as important. Kevin says this would have been useful in the case of OpenSSL.
• Code Reviews and Git Workflows
  • (34:29) Jon asks about workflow support for larger teams and team hierarchy. Jackson talks about some of the different Git workflow methodologies. He says he might eventually add support for code review tools like Gerrit, although he feels that some of these tools give code review a bad name because they force you to look for minutia as opposed to the big picture.
• When Does it Ship
  • (37:56) Jon asks how close he is to shipping. Jackson talks about the beta and some of the challenges of running a beta. [Note: the application is now up on the app store]
• Metrics, Tracking and API Profiling
  • (37:35) Jon asks if he's tracking metrics or tracking. Jackson says he's gathering crash reports and doing some very basic analytics using localytics because he doesn't want users to be concerned. Jon says he likes applications give checkboxes to allow for extended tracking. Jackson talks about how he's using Runscope and would like to allow users to optionally turn Runscope on. Jackson and Jon rave about Runscope; Jackson talks about how a few hours of API profiling helped him significantly improve the application performance. Jon talks about how we don't think about server interactions, and there's all kinds of crazy, scary things going on behind the scenes. Jackson tells a horror story about how the Mono site used to return the logo image when you tried to download, and they didn't find it out until they looked at the server logs. Jon talks about a case where someone requesting the Herding Code RSS feed several times a second.
• What's Next?
  • (48:39) Jon asks what's next for the app. Jackson talks about the difficulty in cutting off the features and shipping a version.
  • (49:29) Kevin asks if he's got big vision for more than code review. Jackson says he just wants to ship it and will probably start looking at other features eventually. Kevin talks about a polititian who's put all of his information on GitHub. Jackson says he's worked with a lawyer in setting up the company and wished they he could work in Markdown. Jon talks about how it would be nice if Markdown had review and change tracking that were similar to Word's. Jon says that the recent hosted Sharepoint releases are getting close. Kevin, Jackson and Jon talk about how foreign the idea of versioning and change tracking is to most professions.
• Random questions
  • (55:35) "Who is the best canadian you know" (Wayne Gretzky)
  • (55:55) "What type of dog is your favorite" Labrador
  • (55:57) "When will you stop lying about your tweets" There's a short discussion about deleting tweets and Jackson's feature request for Tweet focus testing. Jackson talks about a time when Twitter asked users to stop deleting tweets for performance reaons
• Epilogue
  • (59:20) The app is now live on the app store! You can find out about it at CodeReview.io.
  • (1:00:32) Jon asks for some promo codes, Jackson gives away ten free promo codes (below)!

Show Links:

• Jackson Harper (jacksonh.org,  @jacksonh)
• CodeReview.io
• Gerrit code review tool
• Herding Code 168: John Sheehan on Runscope
• Localytics

Promo Codes for show listeners (please just take one, leave a comment when they're all gone):

• http://tokn.co/gcmy5zs7
• http://tokn.co/5qdrawcy
• http://tokn.co/unftsayg
• http://tokn.co/6z5xcs8r
• http://tokn.co/9p243ttq
• http://tokn.co/y49p9z7m
• http://tokn.co/cxvjme4d
• http://tokn.co/pmpnja6f
• http://tokn.co/rakqesz5
• http://tokn.co/e7jdrd2e