Teach Me To Code Podcast

My Equipment: Mackie PROFX12 12-Channel Compact Effects Mixer with USB Sony MDR7506 Professional Large Diaphragm Headphone Roland R-05 Studio WAVE/MP3 Recorder Transcend 32 GB Class 10 SDHC Flash Memory Card (TS32GSDHC10E) (for the Roland R-05) Griffin Technology iMic USB Audio Device Doctor Who TARDIS USB Hub Doctor Who TARDIS USB Hub Model #DR115 QuickVoice Recorder Rolls MM11 Microphone Muting Switch Designed to Temporarily Mute a Balanced XLR Signal Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone Heil Sound SM-2 Shockmount for PR-30 and PR-40 Champagne Heil Sound PL-2T Overhead Broadcast Boom (Standard) Podcasting Club Setup: Behringer Xenyx 802 Premium 8-Input 2-Bus Mixer with Xenyx Mic Preamps and British EQs Shure SM58-CN Cardioid Dynamic Vocal Microphone with Cable On Stage Foam Ball-Type Mic Windscreen, Black Hamilton Nu-Era Tabletop Mic Stand JVC HA-V570 Supra-Aural Headphones

We are joined by Heather Payne, founder of Ladies Learning Code, a [a women-run not-for-profit group working to empower everyone to feel comfortable learning beginner-friendly technical skills in a social, collaborative way.] (from ladieslearningcode.com) Discussion Ladies Learning Code events workshops have a 4:1 ratio of students to instructors it is more difficult to build web apps than simple websites PyLadies workshops workshops are open to all, men and women Ladies Learning Code would like to know: Have you transitioned from the workshop to development work? JavaScript HTML/CSS Ruby Wordpress theme development Mobile Web Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign Reception has been positive This is an intensive 8-9 hour process Workshops make it clear that women are welcome Assumptions of women's involvement in tech projects tend to be more toward marketing/social media, and not development Job description language should become more gender neutral There is a demand for developers Is foul language and naming conventions in some libraries off-putting or offensive for women? Parents make assumptions on their children's interests based on sex, this contributes to less interest in technology later on "It's cool to act dumb in math and science class" Mozilla Community Space Build interest in technology when people are younger Kickstarter LEGO Mindstorms Scratch Hackety Hack Hackasaurus HIVE Learning Network HopScotchKits.com CodeNow KidsRuby CodeAcademy You're more qualified than you think you are eMail list Ladies Learning Code on Twitter Heater Payne on Twitter Ladies Learning Code on Facebook

Peter Ledbrook is an engineer at VMWare and an evangalist for Groovy and Grails. Discussion The Grails Podcast Groovy Grails JVM Static typing Dynamic typing Optional static types in Groovy closures Ruby Rails Java Spock Jar files EnvyCasts Video on Java Jar's Dependency management Java resources for Grails Spring Spring Beans Apache Camel Spring Integration Spring Security Servlets Breadth of libraries in a particular language Spring Social CloudFoundry Grails' Plugin Ecosystem Groovy web console Groovy books Groovy user guide Grails user guide Introductory screencasts on grails.org Groovyblogs.org Peter also gave me these links via email for people to look at: Groovy website: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Documentation Online Groovy console: http://groovyconsole.appspot.com/ Groovy Blogs: http://groovyblogs.org/ Grails user guide: http://grails.org/doc/latest/ Free PDF book! http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/grails-getting-started Introductory screencasts: http://grails.org/screencast/search/?tag=gswg

Chris Mattmann is a Software Engineer at NASA's JPL. He's the VP of OODT in the Apache Software Foundation and an adjunct professor at USC. OODT is a framework for managing data from multiple sources and adding them to other data sources for different purposes (like a database and a search engine.) It manages hundreds of thousands of job in a day and terabytes or petabytes of data from various sources. Mentioned in this episode: Apache OODT Nutch Hadoop Apache Software Foundation NASA NASA JPL ftp sftp Solr Lucene Hive File Catalog vs Search Engine Tika Goodle Project Management was the hard part Assume that failure happens and recover quickly Ganglia Torque PBS struts IDL CHLA (Childrens Hospital of LA) VPICU OODT Contact page (info on mailing lists, etc.)

Today I am joined by Karl Wright, Nokia engineer, ManifoldCF developer and author of ManifoldCF in action. We discuss ManifoldCF, an Apache Incubator project, its beginnings, its purpose and its inner workings.

AppDynamics is a company that provides a monitoring solution for .NET and Java platforms. I spoke with the VP of Engineering and one of the developers of the AppDynamics platform to dig into how they instrument your Java or .NET code and some of the tricks for following transactions from beginning to end. There were a lot of neat tricks in this podcast episode

Jim Jagielski is the president of the Apache Software Foundation and works for Red Hat. He's a founding member of the Foundation and has been a developer on the HTTP server for over a decade. We had an inspiring conversation about the Apache Software Foundation, the origins of the HTTP server, how the Foundation manages projects, and the incubator program. If you manage or contribute to Open Source software, then this is a discussion you'll want to hear.

Jonathan Ellis is the Project Chair of Cassandra and co-founder of DataStax,  a company that specializes in helping companies set up BigData stacks with Cassandra, Hadoop, and other open source software. His company just released DataStax Enterprise. We had a great discussion about the origins of Cassandra, what it's good at, how it stacks up against relational databases, and how a lot of its different parts work.

Lucene is a terrific tool for powering searches. Solr adds a layer of functionality on top of it that makes things even more easy to use. In this interview, Grant and I discuss the ins and outs of using Lucene to power searches on your websites.

I got an email from Michael Seely asking about being a freelancer. I emailed him back and asked him if he'd like to interview me for my podcast and ask me whatever questions he had. He agreed. This is the podcast that resulted.  

I haven't done a podcast in about 3 weeks. I'm changing some things around and wanted to let you know what they were. For this podcast, I plan on foregoing my occasional rants on programming and do interviews every week. If you know someone who I should have on the podcast, then let me know. I'm going to change the format of the Screencasts as well. I'm going to move from a library demo meme to actually building web apps from start to finish. I think these tutorials are useful and insightful. It's also a little different from the other things out there. RailsRookies.com was launched last week. Right now it's a page listing the courses I'll be teaching over the next few months. If you're interested in those courses or something that isn't up there, then fill me in on what you want. I'd love to provide it for you. The Ruby on Rails Basics course starts next week. The newsletter is going to be published every other week. I'll try to share some insight from what I'm reading, studying and working on. I hope you enjoy it. I'm also trying to figure out who is interested in a Freelancing community centered around Ruby. If you'd like to be involved, contact me. Finally, I'm working on some new projects to try to supplement my consulting income. One of them involves Boy Scouts. The other involves online Pay Per Click marketing.

Coulda Filet Test::Unit Thoughts on what make good acceptance tests: Don’t write brittle tests Communication between the coder and customer Not being low level Keep them at the same level of abstraction Thoughts on Cucumber: Jorge likes Cucumber’s Given-When-Then Cucumber’s plain english definitions are extra overhead when your customer isn’t going to read your english definitions. Evan likes Cucumber for: Popping the why stack Given When Then And Evan doesn’t like: It’s an external DSL Boundary between the test language and the code Has loose coupling between step definitions We need our acceptance tests to run fast too. How do you test your javascript? Selenium tests on the critical parts Ignore the javascript and test the ajax requests. capybara-webkit parallel_tests gem Hydra jasmine-fixtures

Marty is the organizer of the Boulder Ruby Users’ Group and Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference. He’s been programming Ruby since 2005. Charley has been programming Ruby for about 6 or 7 years and doing IT for about 15 years. He got involved with Watir, which led him to Ruby. The Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference is held in Boulder and includes several hikes and other activities not normally included in a conferences. I’ll also be speaking at the conference. We went over the differences between the “Boulder Area” and the “Denver Area”. They’re 15-30 minutes apart, but culturally they’re pretty diverse. Boulder is small, but is becoming a startup and technology hub. Both Marty and Charley have been talking about the food experience in Boulder and they’re setting up the conference to be a great food experience as well. I asked if Marty and Charley view the community and regional conferences has changed after organizing a conference. Marty actually helped with Mountain West Ruby Conference. He also went into some of the challenges of picking a date and arranging the conference. He came up with the conference to get local people involved. They also went into how they work around repeated talks and whether or not they want them. Repeaters are OK, but you want a unique program and conference. We also discussed how talks are picked. How much weight the topics, speakers, and explanations get. The discussion finally turned to the venue, which is the historic Boulder Theater. It sounds like a terrific way to run a conference with some of the options they have with setting up the experience. Much different from the hotel based conferences.

Igor started developing in Nginx in 2002. He started building it because he needed something that would effectively proxy connections in an event driven manner. The other webservers at the time could only handle static content and didn’t scale well. Initially, Nginx was used to proxy Apache webserver. Igor was never really fond of fastcgi. It took him 1 to 1 and a half years to add it to Nginx after it’s public release. He explains his opinion on fastcgi. Igor also tells us the primary differences between Apache and Nginx and explains the tradeoffs between the two models. We also dug into what is coming up in the next releases of Nginx and how things will move ahead now that they have formed a company around Nginx. If you would like to donate to Nginx, go to http://sysoev.ru/en/donation.html You can also get on the mailing lists for Nginx at http://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo Finally, follow Nginx on twitter at @nginxorg

In this episode we discussed: MongoDB Standardization of NoSQL databases Portability between non-relational databases CouchDB PostgreSQL AGPL license PostgreSQL license (like the BSD license) MySQL is GPLv2 Drizzle has rewritten their MySQL driver so it’s not GPL Oracle’s behavior toward products they own that compete InnoDB MySQL engine Microsoft SQL - The price hike and bug report that drove Josh to PostgreSQL Customer expectations vs Intended functionality GreenPlum Alexa Implementing the minimum feature set and getting feedback. Transactional DDL - All operations are transactional except create database. Database Migrations - PostgreSQL can do migrations with no downtime. Memcached Redis Solr ElasticSearch Foreign Data Wrappers - a driver for external data sources that can then be managed through PostgreSQL Lucene Hadoop HBase Cassandra Project Voldemort HyperTable Riak Amazon Cap Theorem Papers VoltDB