2 Devs from Down Under Kai Koenig and Mark Mandel

For episode 41 we wanted to be so professional. Kai took his podcast microphone to his co-working space (which is on a really fast fibre connection) for a better recording quality to then have their internet connection break apart halfwalf though our podcast. We actually recorded on the 24th of January - just to make it clear that this is our January podcast and that we're TOTALLY on track for at least one podcast a month in 2017. Since the 24th, Mark was trying to get the editing done and then it was sitting with me for another 2 days until I managed to publish it.


But - we managed to talk about things. Starting off with Kai's house ethernet and wifi rewiring we went on to Mark's "living-in-the-bay-area" bubble and then talked a bit about Ubiquti Wifi gear. As usual we then quite quickly diverge into various aspects of gaming and gaming development tech (Daydream gets a worthwhile mention, too). An interesting discussing arose from that: What'd be the impact on flight training using VR? In particular if you're looking a cost/benefit and potential savings of not having to do as many training flights in a real plane or a very, very, very expensive simulator.


Another tangent was the use of open-source software in the various communities we're hanging out with. Looking at game developer, web dev and enterprise software communities, there's obviously quite a bit difference in how open-source software is used and how the idea of open-source software is fostered.

Welcome to 2016's show of 2DDU. Yeah, we know. I guess it was one of "those" years.


Anyway - we managed to squeeze in a recording, live from Mark's flash podcasting studio at Google and Kai's home office in Wellington's leafy suburb of Karori. Just in case you don't like the audio quality on Kai's side - that's gonna improve for episode 41, whenever that might be...:-/


In this episode however, we play a bit of catchup with our respective lifes and talk about what tickeled our fancies in 2016. For Kai that's essentially Android development and in particular Kotlin. Not unexpectedly Mark's focus in 2016 was on various cloud-y things.


We then talk a little bit about events we've been to, Pokemon Go and other games, how cool the Nintendo Switch will be. Obviously episode 40 also contains the mandatory air travel-in-the-US rant from Kai and a short discussion of Frequent Flyer program usage.


We're committed to be doing much better in 2017. Challenge Accepted, world!

After just another multi-month hiatus, we're proud to finally publish Episode 39 (now featuring and actual intro music!!!!). This time, we're talking about a whole bunch of different things.
Starting off with a brief discussion on what each of us is currently playing (Kai got back into the Nintendo handheld world while Mark is playing Farcry 4 on his PC), we're getting into SeaweedFS, which looks like as if it's a really cool "NoFS" distributed file system/file storage. Kai's been toying around with it a bit and its technology is based on Facebook's Haystack paper. The paper itself is really worthwhile having a read. 
Mark's been using Docker quite a bit to build customised development environments and tells us about that and there's even some code to grab and some video to be watched. There you go!
IntelliJ 15 - both our favourite IDE - is out and sure enough both of us upgraded straight away. It's been a really good experience so far and it's an absolutely worthwhile upgrade. We also briefly discuss Jetbrains' licensing changes and the perception/impact of those. While we're talking about Jetbrains, the discussion moves to Kotlin and to Frege, both reasonably new-ish JVM-based languages. Kotlin is an in-house development of Jetbrains and Frege is more or less Haskell for the JVM.
An interesting discussing arose from that - what makes a language a good fit for a certain purpose or audience - and Mark mentioned he saw a talk about "Evidence-Oriented Programming". It's funny how people pretty much "design" languages (and frameworks) by using criteria "I like this" or "This is how I think X should be done" instead of using approaches such as studies, user-tests or other experiments in trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. And while we have this can of worms opened, let's also question that 'computer science' is a proper science. Kai even dug out a 2003 philosophy of sciences paper he wrote during uni while finishing his Masters concluding that computer science overall really is nothing but an engineering discipline and not a science as such.
We also briefly talked about Kubernetes, a platform to orchestrate Docker, Bitnami Stacksmith and the need (or non-need) to have Windows Server containers that could run on Docker. 
Both of us have been to various events (Mark as part of his job and poor Kai self-funded...) and particular mentions went to Strange Loop, Clojure/conj and CFCamp. Also - if you're interest in presenting at dev.Objective in Minneapolis next year, the call for papers finished on November 29 - that's in 2 days.
Nearly last but not least, there's another quick public service announcement for the folks who have a particular interest in Google's cloud platform. Mark's started a Google Cloud Platform Podcast that's worthwhile listening to. Also - this was the first recording we've ever done with Google Hangouts on Air and Zencastr. Surprisingly (after all of Kai's really bad experiences with Hangouts) this worked really well and we might use those platforms regularly now. 
Music: "Drop" by TREVVRMUSIC, licen

As announced towards the end of our previous episode, this time we had Geoff Bowers on the show. People might know Geoff from things like Sydney's MXDU resp. webDU conferences, him being the benevolent dictator of the Farcry CMS community and other funky ventures. Also, Geoff's current the secretary of the Lucee Association Switzerland (LAS) and that made him an excellent person to talk to about the Railo fork into Lucee.



This is essentially what this show is about. There's a lot of discussion around the legalities of the fork and the points that various parties made in blog posts or Twitter comment. But - you really need to listen to find out more about all that. We also talk about a few other bits and pieces, such as open-source licenses in a more general way, how to deal with intellectual property of employees and about some events.



Please note that Geoff's audio stream for the first part of the show (until he drops off Skype...) is not the greatest, but it should hopefully still be good enough to get a lot out of it. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Mark has arrived in California, so we spend quite a bit of time talking about his experiences over there (mind you, it's been three weeks so far). His new job is a Developer Advocate at Google and given Mark's previous excitement about working with Google Cloud Tech over the last 12-18 months or so, it's fair to assume that this podcast is not ending up being more of an advertorial than it always has been.

When moving to the cloud, cost is an interesting issue --- and that comes up after talking about Mark's recent move of his blog. For starters, we have a very nice comparison of various cloud technology offerings and their features as well cost. Another big topic is the ongoing discussion about Railo -> Lucee and all the gossip around that. Interestingly enough, Mark has a slightly different opinion on the Lucee fork than I have and we'll elaborate on that during the show. You might want to read the blog post from the "majority shareholder" of Railo and Lucee's response and the summary of their excellent keynote at dev.Objective() to be fully on the same page.

We also talked about our ongoing efforts to learn new languages. Kai was playing with Node at dev.Objective() and went through part of the Nodeschool curriculum at an excellent BOF session with Adam Tuttle. Node is clearly an interesting platform, not the least because of the vast amount of available extension modules. Mark has started to learn Haskell in the meantime.

We're back in ~2 weeks and our guest of honour will be Geoff Bowers, Acting Secretary of the Lucee Association Switzerland to fill us in more about Lucee. Hopefully by then I've tried Lucee on a Google Cloud Managed VM and can talk a bit about that, too.

If you have any recommendations for Android- or general Mobile-development-related podcasts, please leave them in the comments.

Oh look, there's another episode of 2DDU podcast...
This time we're talking about a variety of things and personal news. Mark's off to Silicon Valley soon, interviewing for a job at Google. Kai's passed all the written exams for his Commercial Pilot License. Each to their own!

Rust seems to be a language currently going through some hype and Mark had a bit of a play with it. The verdict: Very fluid and full of breaking changes from version to version at this point, but it also has a lot of interesting features: Algebraic Data Types and an interesting memory model to just name a few.
Then there have been some interesting news coming out of the CFML corner. Micha Streit, the inventor and core developer of Railo has forked from Railo 4.2 into Lucee 4.5 and there's lot of good and worthwhile discussion going on over at the new Lucee mailing lists. Adam Cameron's blog posts are worthwhile reading too.
Kai has recently started some serious and commercial Android app development and is raving about the experience for while. Who would ever have though that from an iOS fanboy. Getting into Android development coming from a Java background however is very pleasant and Android Studio certainly helps with it. There's also an interesting Mooc on Coursera.
We're also briefly talking about DB versioning and were wondering what people do about it in real environments. There are various best practices approaches to it, mainly following the concept of "migrations" from the Rails world, but are there any other approaches? Please provide feedback and ideas in the comments after listening... Mark used Sequel in Ruby-land and we briefly mentioned a book on Continuous Database Integration that has a few interesting ideas, too.
Towards the end our discussion swivels towards Docker and Fig. Well, mainly Fig, which seems to be an interesting toolkit to help create customisable and reproducible Docker environments for development setups etc.