Herding Code

Episode 191

The guys (joined by guest host Rob Conery) talk to Derick Bailey about his new podcast audio hosting venture, SignalLeaf.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 191: Derick Bailey on SignalLeaf and Getting Started Podcasting

Show Notes:

• What is SignalLeaf?
  • (00:18) Kevin introduces the show and warns listeners that Rob Conery is present.
  • (01:00) Kevin asks Derick what SignalLeaf is. Derick explains that SignalLeaf is a podcast audio hosting service. He explains how his service compares to big players like Libsyn.
  • (02:05) There's a discussion of Libsyn. Jon confesses that Herding Code still runs off Wordpress on an "unlimited hosting" account.
• Bandwidth costs
  • (02:52) Jon asks Derick if the main cost is bandwidth. Derick explains that SignalLeaf runs on Heroku, but all the storage goes directly to Amazon S3 storage. He agrees that bandwidth is the main cost, and is planning to just make sure the overall subscribers balance out some of the more expensive bandwidth costs.
  • (04:52) Jon asks Derick what else he provides outside of audio hosting. Derick says he provides audio hosting, an RSS feed and stats, but he limits it at that. He also provides a blog with a lot of good information. The goal isn't a big all-in-one service, just keeping it simple for people who want to get started.
  • (06:31) Rob gives the example of the rapid takeoff of This Developer's Life and asks how Derick's planning to handle pricing for unpredictable bandwidth. Derick says the model's focused on unlimited uploads, but limited in how many releases a podcaster makes in a month. He's relying on the law of average to pay for the popular podcasts.
  • (09:18) Rob talks about the huge streaming bills he was getting from Amazon for TekPub, which he almost eliminated by switching to Vimeo. He asks Derick if he's looked into services like that. Derick says the backend is abstracted so he can move to other services if needed.
• What does SignalLeaf run on? (Part 1)
  • (11:10) Jon asks about what SignalLeaf runs on. Derick mentions MongoDb (running on MongoLab), Keen.io  for analytics and CloudAMQP.com for RabbitMQ.
• What services does SignalLeaf provide?
  • (13:25) Kevin asks more about the services SignalLeaf offers. Derick mentions storage, bandwidth, storage and analytics. Something he offers beyond what many other similar services provide is - if you use his RSS feed and embedable audio player - he can tell you where your listeners are coming from.
  • (14:50) Derick mentions his blog post showing that about 50% of listeners don't listen via RSS. Jon said he's seen the same thing with the Herding Code site.
• Stats and advertising services
  • (17:25) Jon says advertisers are always asking for stats, and the kind of stats that advertisers want are hard to find. Derick mentions a service (blubrry) that inserts audio ads, but doesn't think that sounds like a good idea. He mentions a business podcast running on a free service which had some off-color ads included as an example.
• Getting started in podcasting: What equipment and software do you need?
  • (20:40) Rob asks how a developer should get started with creating a podcast. Derick says just hit record and get started. Don't buy equipment, just record something and upload it and get started. He talks about professional podcasters who put artificial barriers up by focusing on radio quality recording; he disagrees.
  • (23:56) Jon mentions Derick's recent post on getting started. He agrees with Derick and says don't start by buying equipment, get started and buy equipment as you need it.
  • (26:11) Jon says he doesn't use his high end condenser microphone because it picks up lots of noise and sounds strange compared to guests and other hosts. Rob asks Derick what people getting started should buy to start with. Derick recommends starting with a $26 Logitech headset, then looking at a $50 Audio Technica ATR 2100, a $90 Blue Yeti, $220 Rode podcaster mic etc.
  • (30:15) Rob asks about recording software. Derick mentions Garageband, Skype Call Recorder and Audacity. Jon uses a free Skype call recorder from scribie.com, Audacity and Reaper.fm. Jon and Derick both love the noise removal feature in Audacity.
  • (33:26) Jon says another thing to figure out at the beginning is how much you want to edit. Jon tries to focus on removing ums and repeated words and things, but leave it sounding natural. Both Jon and Derick say that Rob's the easiest guest to edit.
  • (35:40) Jon asks K. Scott what he uses for recording. He uses Audacity and Camtasia. Jon tells a story about how how he spliced in audio from a previous call when one of the hosts couldn't make a show. It didn't make sense, but no one seemed to notice.
  • (36:50) K. Scott asks what kind of formats don't work on a podcast. Derick says that visual features and visual cues obviously don't translate.
• What does SignalLeaf run on? (Part 2)
  • (38:21) Rob asks everyone to guess about the technology Derick's running on. Turns out it's all Node.js. Derick talks about how he got started with Node.js. Jon asks about what other libraries he's using. Derick mentions Express, S3 restful API's for upload and host, raygun.io for exceptions, keen.io for analytics, stripe.com for billing, MongoDb for data, Mandrill App for SMTP. Derick talks about how little it takes to build up a service now - he's able to stitch a lot of services together to build what he needs. (45:30) K. Scott asks what text editor he uses. Derick's a big VIM fan, having started with a Visual Studio VIM extension a while ago.
  • (47:20) Kevin asks about JavaScript libraries and testing. Derick talks up Backbone, Q and RSVP for promises, Underscore for utilities, and moment.js for date / time math.
  • (50:07) K. Scott asks whether Derick uses Grunt or Gulp. Derick says he's thought about looking at Gulp, but Grunt works for him, although he doesn't like .
• Discussion about managing small, application specific Node modules
  • (50:55) Derick says he doesn't like the way NPM wants you to have a separate git repository for each module - he wants to have all of his modules in one repo. He works around that by using different repositories for development and deployment. Kevin says that his company uses softlinks to work around that, but Derick's not happy with that. Rob thinks you can do file references, but Derick and Kevin disagrees. Jon asks if submodules would work. Rob and Derick discuss cases where it does and doesn't make sense to use different repos for different small modules which are specific to a project. Rob talks about using grunt to run an npm install command, or npm init or start scripts (set in package.json), or npm init.
• Fin
  • (1:01:55) Kevin asks Derick if there's anything else he wants to mention. Derick starts to mention WatchMeCode.com but the calls keep dropping and the show spontaneously combusts.

Show Links:

• Derick Bailey (derickbailey.com,  former Los Techies blog, @derickbailey)
• SignalLeaf
• SignalLeaf blog
  • 4 of the Worst Things to Do When Starting a Podcast
  • Recommended equipment
• WatchMeCode.net
• Using A Single Git Repository for Multiple Heroku Projects
• Equipment (headsets / microphones)
• Logitech ClearChat Comfort/USB Headset H390 (Black)
• Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 Headset (JUG-00013)
• Microsoft LifeChat LX-6000 for Business
• Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB Cardioid Dynamic USB/XLR Microphone
• Blue Microphones Yeti Pro USB Condenser Microphone, Multipattern

Episode 190

In our final interview from NDC London, Jon and K. Scott talk to Rob Ashton his cage match with Jeremy Miller on NodeJS vs. C#, some functional languages he's been learning, and cooking just enough curry.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 190: Rob Ashton on NodeJS vs C#, Clojure and Cooking Constraints

Show Notes:

• The NDC Cage Match: Testing! NodeJS vs. C#
• (00:18) K Scott asks Rob about the cage match he just had with Jeremy Miller comparing testing in NodeJS and C#. Rob's got a lot of good things to say about what Jeremy showed, but is pretty sure he won.
• (02:40) K Scott asks Rob to explain why he doesn't like monkey patching. Rob mentions how QuickCheck helps, then talks about how code structure obviates the need for monkey patching.
• (05:16) Jon asks how he bootstraps his application to inject dependencies and explains how he avoids deep dependency chains.
• Clojure?
• (06:40) K Scott asks what led him to Clojure.
• (07:39) Jon asks Rob what he likes about Clojure. Rob says a better question is what he likes about functional programming languagues, then explains.
• (09:25) K Scott asks about some of the learning project Rob's been working with to learn Clojure. Rob talks about some of the games he started with, then the RavenDb reimplementation he's been building with Clojure called Craven.
• What do you do in your free time?
• (12:56) K Scott asks Rob what he does in his free time. Rob starts by talking about Clojure, then talks about some of the complicated cooking things he's been working on. He talks about some of the similarities between cooking and coding, and some of the constraint he deals with in ambitions cooking projects.
• The future
• (14:58) K Scott asks Rob about some of his plans for early 2014.  Erlang away!

Show Links:

• Rob Ashton (blog, @robashton)
• NDC Cage Match between Rob Ashton and Jeremy Miller: Testing! NodeJS vs. C#
• QuickCheck
• Clojure

Episode 189

At NDC London, Jon and K Scott talk to Gary Bernhardt about his talk, The Birth and Death of JavaScript.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 189: Gary Bernhardt on The Birth and Death of JavaScript

Show Notes:

• (00:15) The talk occurs in the year 2035. JavaScript is now pronounced differently, and there has been another world war.
• (01:20) Jon ran over to the talk when he heard (via Twitter) that Gary was (or will be, it's all so confusing) mentioning Singularity.
• (02:20) Jon asks about Gary's references to the performance improvements gained by turning off hardware protection. Gary and Jon discuss how Singularity and the (yet to be developed) Asm language offer high performance due to this approach.
• (04:10) Jon asks why JavaScript has died, since Asm is universal. Gary mentions some of the problems - many historical - with JavaScript. And Gary should know, he's famous for the "wat" talk showing several JavaScript insanities.
• (05:37) Jon asks for some reasons why JavaScript had to die. Gary explains how it's really just running on inertia now, and that it'd be preferable to use a better designed language like Clojure.
• (06:30) Jon asks what we're writing our code in, now that it's compiling to Asm. Gary doesn't specify that - it's not really necessary to pick one, and he doesn't need to alienate anyone unnecessarily.
• (07:45) Jon asks if Asm is a binary format. Gary clarifies that it's the JavaScript subset that was proposed in 2012.
• (08:54) Jon asks if Asm is perfect, or just good enough. Gary talks about how both Asm and the HTML DOM (which also has become universal in 2035) are full of flaws, but they're better than fragmentation. Jon and Gary talk abouthow
• (10:45) K Scott says this all sounds plausible, all that's needed is time. So, why 2035? Gary talks about his reasoning... it could happen faster. He talks about some core services moving into operating system kernels, and Jon and K Scott agree.
• (12:55) Jon applauds Gary's 25-30 minute talk length.
• (13:15) Jon mentions some of the interesting audience questions at the end of the talk. Gary talks about some of the most interesting. All of them were pretty easy except for the question of parallel execution.
• (15:20) There's a discussion about the limitations of x86 architecture and parallelism.
• (16:10) Jon asks about some of the other things Gary's up to - there are the Destroy All Software screencasts and a consumer product Gary's working on but isn't ready to announce yet.
• (16:40) K Scott asks Gary about relaxation and recreation. Gary says that he'd become really preoccupied with things that were bad in software, and it was stressing him out. He's made three changes: intentional social interactions, crossfit and playing guitar. All three have helped him be less angry about the state of software... which is all hacks on x86, when we get down to it.

Show Links:

• Gary Bernhardt  on Twitter - @garybernhardt
• Video of The Birth And Death Of JavaScript talk at PyCon 2014
• WAT (lightning talk from CodeMash 2012)
• Destroy All Software screencasts
• asm.js
• Microsoft Singularity project

Episode 188

At NDC London, Jon talks to Pete Smith about Superscribe, a library which brings graph based routing to ASP.NET, Web API and OWIN.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 188: Pete Smith on Superscribe

Note: There's a little bit of background noise due to the conference recording.

Show Notes:

• Intro to Superscribe
• (00:20) Jon asks Pete to explain what Superscribe's graph-based routing means. Pete explains how traditional routing needs to check each route for a match, one at a time. Graph-based routing stores using a structure, so there are some performance gains due to only matching routes with a matching structure rather than using string matching.
• (02:17) Pete explains that graph based routing is language agnostic, so there's also a JavaScript implementation.
• Extensibility due to strongly typed route nodes
• (02:37) Each node in the graph is a strongly typed entity, so you can use an activation function for each node in the graph to determine if it's a match rather than just using a simple regex match. You can write custom activation functions for any node. For parameter matching, Superscribe uses TryParse rather than regex matches.
• (04:22) There are three guiding principles behind Superscribe: composability, efficiency and extensibility.
• The OWIN connection
• (05:22) Jon asks where Superscribe can be used. Pete says it's currently usable in Web API and OWIN, with NancyFx and possibly MVC on the way.
• (06:02) In addition to activation functions, you can also define an action function which says what should happen when a node is matched. This allows running different OWIN middleware based on route matches. This means you can hook up authentication middleware using an action function which will only operate on a specific node.
• Graphs vs. Trees
• (08:16) You can hook up optional nodes, which would allow things like an optional /debug/ route prefix which would hook up tracing middleware. Pete says this is something that wouldn't be possible with tree-based routing (available in NancyFx).
• (09:00) Jon asks what the difference is between tree-based routing and graph-based routing. Both are connected nodes, and trees are a type of graph in which the node connections branch out and ever reconnect, whereas in a graph any node may connect to any other node.
• API options: Different ways to define route graphs
• (09:53) Jon asks how developers will define nodes in Superscribe. Pete talks about the difference between economy and expressivity: economic design has fewer options but is easy to learn, while expressive design offers many options but a steeper learning curve. Superscribe is currently more expressive, using a domain specific language using operator overloads. It overloads the / symbol to add segments and the | operator to allow defining multiple routes (or the entire graph) in a single line.
• (12:28) Jon says that you can always add an economic API layer over an expressive one. Pete agrees and says that since everything's strongly typed underneath, you can configure it explicitly or fluently  as well (if you don't like the DSL).
• (13:14) Jon asks about how to hook in action functions or activator functions. Pete says they're currently not available in the DSL, so you'd need to build those notes out by hand at this point.
• Miscellaneous questions and pretend ending
• (15:08) Jon asks about using routes for localization. Pete talks about some options for doing that.
• (16:28) Jon asks what's next on the list. Pete lists some features: syntax improvements and OWIN middleware ideas.
• (19:12) Jon asks how people can learn more and keep up, Pete talks about Superscribe.org.
• (20:12) Jon asks about the use case for Superscript in JavaScript. Pete talks about how activation functions are really useful in single page applications and how he's using this in a production application. He's working on packaging this up as Superscribe.js.
• Update on the 0.4 release (follow-up phone call)
• (22:11) Jon asks what's new in the 0.4 release. Pete starts by describing some improvements to the routing syntax.
• (23:02) You can now combine Web API replacement routing, traditional routing, Attribute Routing and Superscribe in the same application, so you can pick and choose.
• (23:24) You can wire it up with an IOC container, so you can compose different components based on routes. You can also use route information in OWIN middleware.
• (23:56) Everything about the new release is up on the Superscribe.org site.

Show Links:

• Pete Smith (blog, @roysvork)
• Superscribe

Episode 187

At NDC London, Jon and K. Scott talk to Paul Betts about several of his recent open source libraries designed to simplify cross platform development on C#.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 187: Brock Allen on ASP.NET Security and Identity

Show Notes:

• Intro
  • (00:18) Brock gave two presentations on security at NDC, as well as a two day pre-conference workshop with Dominick Baier (also on security).
• Brock's contribution of CORS support to ASP.NET Web API
  • (00:35) Jon asks Brock about the CORS support he recently contributed to ASP.NET Web API. Brock tells the history of how he built a CORS implementation at Thinktecture and how he went about contributing it.
  • (01:21) Jon asks Brock about what was involved in his CORS implementation. Brock describes the limitations browsers place on cross-origin requests and how CORS solves that. It's defined in the HTML5 specs and is supported by all modern browsers.
  • (02:12) Jon asks what's required on the server for CORS to work. Brock explains how servers respond to browsers to tell them they support CORS and which other servers they want to allow communications with.
  • (02:45) The most common form of browser communications for CORS is via an OPTIONS request from the browser, to which the server responds using predefined headers.
  • (03:14) K. Scott asks about the process of getting his CORS implementation added to the ASP.NET Web API codebase. Brock explains the process, including his big pull request and the month of work he and Yao put in to getting the code "Microsoftified." Brock's implementation was pretty broad, the shipping version was targeted just at Web API.
• Thinktecture Identity Model
  • (04:59) Jon asks if there's any reason to use the Thinktecture Identity Model version now. Brock explains the other areas that Identity Model supports, and that many of the features of Thinktecture Identity Model have been removed as ASP.NET Web API has added a lot of these features to the core.
• ASP.NET Identity and Membership Reboot
  • (06:09) K. Scott asks how the identity features in Thinktecture Identity Model compare to the new features shipped in the new ASP.NET Identity system. Brock describes the problems that the ASP.NET Identity system was designed to solve.
  • (07:02) Brock describes the membership system he wrote as an alternative to the ASP.NET provider model system, called Membership Reboot. His Membership Reboot system includes things like password resets and e-mail account verification which are not in the initial version of ASP.NET Identity, but he thinks that the new system is well architected to add these in, since it's just a NuGet package.
  • (07:42) Jon asks Brock about the other features Membership Reboot covers. Brock says that was the subject of one of his talks - how he implemented features like password reset, e-mail verification and two factor authentication without opening up attack vectors.
• ASP.NET Security
  • (08:27) K. Scott asks about the other talks Brock did at NDC London. His other talk was on ASP.NET Core Security - he focused on teasing apart the membership and forms authentication parts so they're understood as separate components.
  • (09:20) Jon asks Brock how he got interested in security. Brock talks about his background in programming, and how he thinks it's interesting to see how the different parts work together.
  • (09:48) Jon talks about cases he sees where developers decide they want to write their own security implementations for speed or other reasons. Brock says that was one of the key points of his talk: you don't want to implement those things yourself.
  • (10:19) Jon asks about common security issues that developers commonly forget to consider. Brock lists several: proper implementation of SSL, password management, etc.
• What's Next For Brock?
  • (11:09) Jon asks what's next for Brock. He'll be busy: he's got a lot of course rework for recent updates, Identity Server v3 (with OpenID Connect).
  • (11:46) Jon asks how OpenID Connect affects him as a developer.
  • (13:15) K. Scott asks what Brock does to relax. Brock does Tai Chi and Kung Fu.

Show Links:

• Paul Betts (blog, @BrockLAllen, github)
• Thinktecture Identity Model
• Membership Reboot
• Identity Reboot 
• ASP.NET Identity

Episode 186

At NDC London, Jon and K. Scott talk to Paul Betts about several of his recent open source libraries designed to simplify cross platform development on C#.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 186: Paul Betts on three cross-platform libraries: splat, ModernHttpClient and punchclock

Show Notes:

• Intro
  • (00:18) Jon welcomes Paul back - he's been on a few times before, talking about GitHub for Windows and Reactive UI.
  • (00:28) Paul has a dream: he'd like to write applications in C# and have them run everywhere: iOS, Android, Windows Phone maybe even WinRT. He's not interested in sharing everything (views or designer code), but there's plenty of other code that developers shouldn't need to rewrite for every platform.
  • (01:16) Jon asks if Xamarin doesn't help with this. Paul says that Xamarin's intention is to give you direct access to the native platform, which is good when developing for a specific platform, but not when you're working on cross-platform applications.
  • 01:32 Paul's been on a crusade, writing a lot of small, cross-platform libraries.
• splat
  • (01:48) splat is a library that lets you share certain things in cross-platform viewmodels, the biggest one being images. It allows for the simple load-and-display scenario. Each platform hast its own image types; splat gives you a common abstract image type that you can then cast to a native image. This allows you to write cross-platform viewmodels and just have native views. splat also gives you System.Drawing on platforms that don't have it, e.g. WinRT by providing common types for primitives like colors and rectangles.
  • (04:08) Jon asks if portable class libraries will help with this. Paul explains the PCL operations for splat.
  • (04:45) Jon asks about support for high-DPI / Retina images. Paul talks about how the different platforms handle high DPI images.
• ModernHttpClient
  • (05:44) Paul says that HttpClient is implemented on Xamarin using HttpWebRequest. This has some problems: it doesn't use 3G on iOS, and it's a blocking call. That means if you make several web requests, you end up with a bunch of waiting threads and the app slows down.
  • (06:45) There are better APIs available on each platform, so Paul's taken the most popular HTTP libraries on each platform and made them HttpClient compatible. HttpClient allows you to specify an HttpMessageHandler, so in your portable library you can just drop in the handlers provided by ModernHttpClient .
  • (08:33) In the latest version, Paul's done work to make sure you can cancel requests. This lets you cancel a request based on headers (e.g. status codes or ETags) which can make a big difference on mobile network usage.
  • (09:23) Jon asks how it works in the Windows platforms. Paul says that on WinRT it's already built in, and on Windows Phone there's no way to do anything better than HttpWebRequest.
  • Jon asks a bit more about how you use it. Paul explains how platform-specific factory methods can provide the different handlers.
• punchclock
• (11:00) punchclock lets you make multiple web requests; it queues them up and makes the requests for you so there are a maximum of four web requests at a time. It's based on an Android library called Volley.
• (12:20) punchclock is a priority based scheduler. You can then make things like analytics low priority and user initiated requests high priority.
• (13:12) It's not just specific to network requests, you can use it for anything that's awaitable.
• What's Paul using these on?
  • (13:35) Jon asks Paul what kind of mobile applications he's building that are pushing him to build these libraries. Paul says he's been working on some internal applications at GitHub. One example is a support application called Halp. It lets customer support people use @mention style messages to developers, allowing developers to respond quickly from mobile devices.
• Reactive UI documentation
  • (15:10) Jon asks Paul what he's been doing when he's not writing cool code. Paul says he's been working on documentation for Reactive UI by writing one big article per day.

Show Links:

• Paul Betts (blog, @paulcbetts, github)
• splat
• ModernHttpClient
• punchclock

Episode 185

At NDC Jon and K. Scott talk to Glenn Block about Splunk.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 185: Glenn Block on Splunk

Show Notes:

• Intro
• (00:18) Glenn got a new job at Splunk.
• What is Splunk?
• (00:40) Jon asks Glenn what Splunk does. Splunk has a product that gathers operational intelligence. It's got a data analytics platform which understands a lot of log formats. It can handle streaming logs and has a bunch of API's. It can index in realtime, handles unstructured data, and has some advanced pattern matching features.
• (02:12) Glenn talks about some common uses. GitHub and Target both use Splunk. It's especially liked by IT Admins who can query across multiple servers by timeslice in realtime. There's a customizable dashboard to surface the information.
• (03:24) Glenn says that since Splunk has a powerful API, you can push data into it. You can push data in using HTTP or TCP.
• (04:01) You can teach Splunk to fetch data from a source using their app platform. Glenn talks about an Azure app he built for Windows Azure Web Sites diagnostics.
• (05:39) Splunk is available in the cloud, but it's often run on premises. It's cross-platform. It doesn't store the data, it just indexes it.
• Pricing, free versions, cloud hosted versions
• (06:44) Glenn says the pricing is based on data throughput. They have a free license that gives you 500MB/day, a developer license that gives you 10GB/day for a limited time, a free cloud product called Splunk Storm which gives you 20GB/application for a 30 days, and a new enterprise product called Splunk Cloud running in AWS. The enterprise cloud product is especially useful for AWS hosted apps.
• (08:20) Jon asks if there's a planned cloud hosted offering for Windows Azure. Glenn says he's pushing for it, but in the meantime it's pretty easy to install it yourself.
• (08:58) K. Scott asks about what he'd see if he used Glenn's Azure app on a Windows Azure Web Site. Glenn lists some of the data and sources.
• Developing Splunk apps and language support
• (10:03) K. Scott asks about the process of writing a Splunk app. Glenn talks about all the language specific SDK's they support and describes the process.
• (11:20) K. Scott asks how they support so many languages in Splunk. Glenn says it's pretty Unixy in that it works with streams, so all the language specific SDK's work with that.
• Using Splunk for evented data, not just logs
• (12:25) Jon asks about some  real world examples of things people are monitoring. Glenn talks about a recent DSL-like feature called data models, which allows business analysts to search through the data, and graphically pivot on it. One of the places people use that is for monitoring the entire dev lifecycle. Security auditing is a huge use case. 50% of the Fortune 100 uses Splunk. Glenn gives an example of how one of his co-workers wrote a Node app using Firebase's bus feed to show a realtime map with bus location.
• (16:00) Jon says this seems to blur the lines between logs and event sourcing. Glenn says it's not just a log platform, and works really well with evented data.
• Technology stack
• (16:44) Jon asks what technologies it runs on, and if it's using Hadoop. Glenn says Hadoop's great, but not for realtime. They do have a product called Hunk which can access Hadoop HDFS information, though. It's mostly C++ and Python (Django). They've recently rolled out an app frameowrk which makes it easy to customize Splunk using Django. There's no database, since Splunk really just maintains indexes to data from other sources.
• Glenn's new book: Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET
• (19:25) Jon asks Glenn what he does in his free time. Glenn talks about the book he (and friends) are just finishing, called Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET. It focuses on building a real system using hypermedia using ASP.NET Web API.
• (20:35) Jon asks about versioning: are they using headers, URLs, etc.? Glenn says their argument is based on using additional media types and hypermedia. Hypermedia makes it easier to evolve your API because your clients are following links, not using hardcode URLs.
• (22:15) Jon says hypermedia sounds great, but developers often want to follow defined links. Glenn says he doesn't think it as a magical automaton, but both developers and code can look for new links as they're added.
• (23:40) Jon says it's harder to evolve APIs if you're thinking RPC style, but once you're focused on resouces it's easier. Glenn says this pattern has worked great for the web - clients just ignore things they don't understand. Jon and Glenn say this is similar also to the move from relational databases to document databases.
• (24:30) Glenn says it's exciting to finally see some hypermedia APIs coming out: PayPal, GitHub, Amazon's streaming APIs, and NPR's recent API updates based on hypermedia.
• (25:30) Glenn says the book doesn't try to convince you that this is the only way, just shows the benefits. K. Scott says this sounds really useful to move from the theoretical to some concrete examples.

Show Links:

• Glenn Block (blog, @gblock)
•  Splunk
• Splunk developer information
• Book: Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET

Episode 184

At NDC Jon and K. Scott talk to Scott Guthrie about his talk Building Real World Apps with Windows Azure, what's new in Windows Azure, the advantage of provisioning and scaling up and down instantly, and more.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 184: Scott Guthrie on Windows Azure

Show Notes:

• Scott talk: Building Real World Apps with Windows Azure
  • (00:18) Scott's talk covered twelve patterns for building cloud apps using things like continuous delivery, transient fault handling, long term failures, etc.
• What's new in Windows Azure
  • (01:02) Jon asks Scott to overview the highlights of what's new in Windows Azure over the past year
  • (01:25) Scott says they generally ship a major release every three weeks
  • (01:40) Scott talks about how they're using agile approaches to development, and some services update as often as ten times a day
  • (02:19) Scott overviews some of the main things that shipped over the past year
    • Virtual Machine and Virtual Networking
    • Windows Azure Web Sites
    • Auto-Scale support
    • Hadoop
    • Mobile Services
    • Push Notification
    • Media Services
• (06:37) K. Scott asks how Auto-Scale came to be. Scott Guthrie tells the story about how it came from an acquisition of an Azure startup incubation project. The team joined at the end of March and the feature shipped in June.
• (08:42) Scott talks about how Azure and Cloud Development help you move faster with illustrations of how quickly you can create and integrate services and infrastructure and support multiple regions.
• (10:22) Scott talks about the advantages of being able to quickly scale both up and down. He talks about how Troy Hunt was able to scale up Azure instances to crunch through databases of breached passwords to make it easy to see if your password has been compromised, then scaled right back down and spent less than a dollar.
• (14:09) K. Scott asks about Node.js support. Scott talks about how they've been supporting Node for a long time, and how cloud development lets you easily choose between tools for different applications.
• (15:09)Jon asks Scott what books he's been reading lately.
  • (15:45) He's been reading a lot of work related books on things like supply chain management
  • (16:35) Scott mentions the new Web API book by Glenn Block and friends
  • (16:46) He went to Australia and read a book called Fatal Shore, a book about the founding of Australia

Show Links:

• Scott Guthrie (blog, @scottgu)
• Windows Azure
• Video from Scott's talk: Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part I and Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part II
• E-Book version of Scott's talk: Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure
• Troy Hunt: Using high-spec Azure SQL Server for short term intensive data processing
• Book: Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET
• Book: The Fatal Shore

Episode 183

The guys talk to Pablo Santos about Semantic Merge, a merge tool that understands your code.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 183: Semantic Merge with Pablo Santos

Show Notes:

• Intro
• (00:18) Semantic Merge is a diff tool with a semantic understanding of your code.
• Language support
• (01:01) Jon asks about what languages Semantic Merge supports. It currently supports C#, Visual Basic.NET and Java, and they're currently working on adding support for C, then C++.
• (02:00) Jon noticed that they're using Roslyn and asks about that. Pablo says that it worked really well, handling the parsing to allow them to focus on the important things like diff calculation and semantic merge calculation
• (03:02) Jon asks about support for JavaScript. Pablo says it's still under development and there's a lot of demand for it. Since JavaScript isn't so tightly structured, they're still working on figuring out how to come up with something really useful there.
• (04:08) Jon asks about how they handle parsing outside of Roslyn and .NET. Pablo lists the different parsers they use for different languages. They've opened up the way that languages plug in, which allowed for a community contributed Delphi parser.
• (5:33 Scott K. asks about support for Typescript, since it's more strongly typed. Pablo says that'll be easier, but they're working through the language support list in order of demand.
• What kind of semantics can Semantic Merge understand?
• (06:28) K. Scott talks about what Semantic Merge does at a high level and asks about the different refactorings Semantic Merge can and can't understand. Pablo explains a common scenario in which you'd be afraid to refactor code while adding or changing functionality if you know someone else is also working on it. Semantic Merge understands the refactorings so it's easy to merge the actual changes. What Semantic Merge currently doesn't handle is multi-file semantic merges, e.g. with code being refactored into another file. They've got a working prototype for that, but it's harder to plug into different source control systems since they handle multi-file merges differently.
• (08:52) Pablo points out that, while it's called Semantic Merge, the diff functionality is really useful on its own.
• The importance of graphical representation of merge issues
• (09:17) Jon talks about how good the graphical representation is - both really easy to read and just generally nice looking. Pablo says they've put a lot of work into that and explains why they've designed it as they have.
• (10:41) Scott K. says that developers are often stuck in a textual viewpoint for diff and merge, but a good graphical representation can be really useful. Pablo says that we've seen a recent revolution in source control tools, but we're still using tools and technologies from twenty years ago. Jon says that the older ways of displaying diff and merge results with plus and minus lines was based on working with the old source control systems and mostly doing two-way merges.
• (13:25) Pablo says it's something that you really miss when it's not there - big merges with lots of files look scary, but when you see that the actual changes are minimal it's not such a big deal. Scott K. mentions a joke he saw on twitter about how a ten line code review finds ten issues, but a thousand line review passes easily.
• (15:17) Jon asks how Semantic Merge has changed the way their team develops code, for instance by making them more ready to refactor code. Pablo gives an example with working on a year-old branch in which traditional diff gave him tons of merge conflicts but Semantic Merge only gave him one.
• (17:19) Jon noticed that many of the samples were able to automatically merge everything and asks how Semantic Merge detects merge conflicts. Pablo explains how Semantic Merge not only is able to detect when changes don't cause conflicts, but can also detect merge conflicts that other tools won't find.
• Version control integration
• (19:36) Jon asks about which version control systems Semantic Merge integrates with. Pablo lists Git, Mercurial, TFS, Perforce, Sourcetree and Subversion and says that it'll plug into just about anything because just about all version control systems use common conventions for diff / merge tool integration.
• Platform support
• (20:51) Jon asks about their recent Linux support and asks if that's done using Xamarin and Mono. They use Mono for common backend code, but wrote native front-end code for Linux using Gtk#. They're currently working on an OSX version using MonoMac, which gives it a true native front-end with a standard Mac look and feel.
• Pricing model and free licenses
• (22:52) Jon asks about the pricing model. There's a 15 day free trial and a monthly subscription for $4/month. They wanted to experiment with pricing to make it so inexpensive that pricing wasn't an issue. Jon asks if the subscription checking is complex. Pablo says it give you a lot of leeway so it won't block you if you're coding on a plane or something. They don't obsess over security since it's such an inexpensive application to begin with.
• (25:36) Jon asks about their free licenses for open source developers. Pablo says they use Mono extensively and have been offering open source licenses for Plastic SCM for a while. Pablo mentions some of the open source projects using Semantic Merge, including F-Spot and a lot of other Mono projects.
• Semantic based insights
• (26:57) Jon asks they could use their information about semantic changes to source code over time to offer other insights to developers. Pablo says that this is something they've been doing with Plastic SCM with features like semantic method history, so you can track changes to a method over time across renames, refactoring to other files, etc. They also can offer richer metrics, so you don't just see lines of code changed but can understand methods changed, refactorings, etc. Their goal for a long time has been to transform version control from a delivery mechanism to a productivity tool for developers.
• Plastic SCM
• (29:04) Jon asks how Plastic SCM compares to other version control systems. Pablo recommends going to PlasticSCM.com and look at the branch explorer. It's as powerful as Git but very easy to use. It's fully decentralized. It's very graphical, and you can do almost everything from the branch explorer. It integrates well with enterprise security with support for things like ACL's. It (of course) offers support for a lot advanced merge scenarios. It's been under development since 2005, they're in version 5 right now. It's free for every team under 15 developers.
• (31:25) Jon asks if there's a way to test-drive Plastic SCM against an existing Git repository. Pablo explains how to do that without changing version control systems, since Plastic SCM can natively use the Git API.
• (34:25) K. Scot asks about an old blog post about a small Windows Git application client; Pablo says that's no longer required as it's built into Plastic SCM.
• Wrap up
• (34:55) Jon asks about where listeners can find out more about Semantic Merge and Plastic SCM.
• (35:50) Jon mentions that he really likes the team page on the Plastic SCM site - all the faces follow the mouse cursor as you move it around. He's easily amused.

Show Links:

• Semantic Merge (@semanticmerge)
• Plastic SCM (@plasticscm)
• Plastic SCM blog

Episode 182

The guys talk to Rob Eisenberg about the Durandal Kickstarter. This Kickstater ends on January 10, 2014, so go back it now!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 182: Durandal Kickstarter with Rob Eisenberg

Show Notes:

• Durandal overview
  • Quick overview of what Durandal is
  • How Durandal compares to other SPA frameworks
  • Durandal updates to date
• Durandal Kickstarter
  • Timeframe
  • Contribution amounts and benefits
  • List of Kickstarter goals
  • How Kickstarter benefits relate to OSS release
• Release goal
• Tooling goal
• Training goal
• NextGen
  • Flexible modules
  • Web Components
  • Object.observe
  • Dependencies
  • Polyfills
• Backer benefits

Show Links:

• Rob Eisenberg - @EisenbergEffect
• Durandal 2014 Kickstarter
• DurandalJS.com
• Mozilla x-tag
• Addy Osmani - The future of data binding is object.observe