Google, like Microsoft, is famous for asking brain-teaser style questions during their interviews. However, in a June, 2013 interview with the New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the Sr. VP of HR for Google, said that

“[B]ainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

I’m surprised how well that my commentRss proposal has been accepted in the world. As often as not, if I’m digging through an RSS feed for a site that supports comments, that site also provides a commentRss element for each item. When I proposed this element, my thinking was that I could make a comment on an item of interest, then check a box and I’d see async replies in my RSS client, thereby fostering discussion. Unfortunately, RSS clients never took the step of allowing me to subscribe to comments for a particular item and a standard protocol for adding a comment never emerged, which made it even less likely for RSS clients to add that check box. All in all, commentRss is a failed experiment.

Fostering Discussion in Blog Post Comments

This part 3 of a multi-part series on taking a real-world web site (mine) written to be hosted on an ISP (securewebs.com) and moving it to the cloud (Azure). The first two parts talked about moving my SQL Server instance to SQL Azure and getting my legacy ASP.NET MVC 2 code running inside of Visual Studio 2013 and published to Azure. In this installment, we’ll discuss how I configured DNS and SSL to work with my shiny new Azure web site.

Configuring DNS

In our last episode, I talked about the joy and wonder that is moving my site’s ISP-hosted SQL Server instance to SQL Azure. Once I had the data moved over and the site flipped to using the new database, I needed to move the site itself over, which brought joy and wonder all it’s own.

Moving to Visual Studio 2013

In a world where the cloud is not longer the wave of the future, but the reality of the present, it seems pretty clear that it’s time to move sellsbrothers.com from my free ISP hosting (thanks securewebs.com!) to the cloud, specially Microsoft’s Azure. Of course, I’ve had an Azure account since its inception, but there has been lots of work to streamline the Azure development process in the last two years, so now should be the ideal time to jump in and see how blue the waters really are.

As with any modern web property, I’ve got three tiers: presentation, service and database. Since the presentation tier uses server-side generated UI and it’s implementation is bundled together with the service tier, there are two big pieces to move — the ASP.NET site implementation and the SQL Server database instance. I decided to move the database first with the idea that once I got it hosted on Azure, I can simply flip the connection string to point the existing site to the new instance while I was doing the work to move the site separately.

I’ve been watching the Portland startup scene for years. However, in the last 12 months, it’s really started to take off, so when I had an opportunity to mentor at the recent Portland Startup Weekend, I was all over it. I got to do and see all kinds of wonderful things at PDXSW, but one of the best was meeting Thubten Comerford and Tyler Phillipi. Between the three of us, we’re bringing the very popular Tech Meetup conference format to Portland.

The idea of a Tech Meetup is meant to be focused on pure tech. In fact, at the largest of the Tech Meetups in New York (33,000 members strong!), they have a rule where it’s actually rude to ask about the business model. The Tech Meetups are tech for tech’s sake. If you’re in a company big or small or if you’re just playing, cool tech always has a place at the Portland Tech Meetup.

This has been my first week at Snapflow and what a week it’s been! I’ve already spend a good part of two days with actual customers that are excited about using Snapflow to build their web and mobile applications, started on a technical spike for one of those apps to be delivered on our platform in February and found the local Hawaiian teriyaki place.

As Chief Technical Officer at Snapflow, I’ll have influence over internal technology direction and external outreach, help to build our suite of products as well as growing the engineering team and work to understand our customers and make sure that they’re happy.

As soon as I saw Anders’ talk on TypeScript, I fell in love. If you’re not familiar with it, TypeScript adds a lot of necessary features to JavaScript to make it suitable for building real apps, while still “compiling down” to JavaScript to maintain JS’s single biggest advantage: ubiquity. Further, TypeScript has tooling inside Visual Studio so that it works nicely with a wide variety of Windows projects, including Win8/JS projects.

However, while Microsoft has made a nice Win8/TS sample available, there are currently no Visual Studio project templates for building my own apps. Luckily, it was easy enough to build some: