What will it take to send humans to Mars and back? And what about actually colonizing Mars? Time to Geek Out! Richard talks through the history of manned missions to Mars, starting with Werner Von Braun's own Das MarsProjekt. The story evolves with Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars and the idea (and technology) behind In-Situ Resource Utilization - refuelling ships on Mars by making methane. That's the beginning elements of humans actually living on Mars. Elon Musk talks about creating an independent colony on Mars, requiring one million colonists. What would it take to make that possible?

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How do you make a mobile web site go fast? The same way you make any web site go fast! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about his strategies for making fast web pages. The conversation starts out discussing how mobile apps are even more performance sensitive than regular web pages, because mobile devices typically have less bandwidth and more limited processing power for rendering. Chris points to one of his favorite tools - WebPageTest, as a great starting point for knowing where to look for performance gains on web pages. This leads to discussion on image compression, CDNs, time-to-live settings and more!

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Unifying your Git GUI experience! Carl and Richard talk to Amy Palamountain from GitHub about how GitHub Desktop is bringing together the separate GitHub for Mac and GitHub for Windows products. Amy explains that in the past, there were separate GUI clients for Mac and Windows, with separate feature sets and styles. Bringing the codebase together keeps the releases more consistent, but it also represents an interesting unified coding approach using technologies like Reactive Extensions and other cross-platform tooling. Check it out!

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So how do you get to "yes" with business decision makers? Carl and Richard talk to Eileen Fisher about how tech folks can be more effective communicating with folks that aren't in technology but make decisions on what technology to use. Eileen runs through seven key points for talking to decision makers - staying clear of technical jargon when dealing with business people and focusing on the things that matter with those folks. They may think differently than you, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking - you have to meet them where they are!

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So what happens when you dive head-first into the latest Javascript libraries? Carl and Richard chat with Julie Lerman about her experiences playing with Rob Eisenberg's Aurelia library. Of course, it doesn't stop there: If you're going to learn Aurelia, you're going to change the whole stack - including node, expressjs and DocumentDB! Julie walks through the process of adding each of the bits into the stack, learning online through search engines and twitter, and what she brought back from this exploration that changed the way she works with C# and Entity Framework!

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Have you automated your deployment infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Wrock about his tool chain for doing deployments. The raft of tools is long, but largely familiar: NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter, Vagrant. Matt continues on with Atlas, Packer and Boxcutter to put together a completely automated process to build new VMs with services, tools and your software all pre-configured and ready to go. More good thinking about getting your configuration down as code!

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How do you manage version numbers? Carl and Richard talk to Jake Ginnivan about his open source project called GitVersion. GitVersion works to automate the semantic versioning of your software. The conversation starts out focused on the details of semantic versioning - beyond the major.minor.patch, there are the alpha, beta and release candidate builds. Jake walks through the process of automating versioning, being able to understand what changes you've made to your code to know what numbers need to increment. This is a cool tool to check out!

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Messaging in browsers? Carl and Richard talk to Derick Bailey about messaging patterns in Javascript. Yes, browsers always use messages, that's what HTTP is about - but there are messages, and there are messages. Derick talks about using the publish/subscribe pattern with RabbitMQ to build a highly scalable system. These are patterns that are popular outside of the web, but the modern web can do anything any other system can do - so it's time to put these messaging patterns to work in your web applications!

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How does Windows 10 change NuGet? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about the new features being added to NuGet to support Windows 10 Universal Apps. The core feature is the ability to build a NuGet package that will run on all the Windows 10 universal platforms - PC, tablet and phone. The conversation then switches to the Visual Studio 2015 launch and the crazy three day hackathon preceding it that Jeff participated in, building the AllReady applications for Humanitarian Toolbox and the RedCross. The project is now open source on GitHub and ready for lots of contributors, check it out!

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One girl shy of a Mondays - Carl and Richard try and stay on topic with Mark Miller while they explore the science of great design. The truth is that Mark has been working for decades to build software that is truly intuitive to use, and the talks about all the subtle, but broadly applicable details that can make an application truly a pleasure to use. As is typical of Mark, this is nothing vague, but concrete, detailed and repeatable steps for making better designed software. You need to check out his amazing videos on the subject, it can make your software better!

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