Episode 30 - Broken Code, Rayguns, Enterprise Software and an Ark

Today we've been joined by John-Daniel Trask, one of Kai's Wellington-based friends who's also the co-founder of both Mindscape and Raygun.io. Kai admitted that Mark clearly won "thing of the day" this time, but he's already planning his come back from that loss for episode 31 in about two weeks. After this unavoidable business of the day we start talking to JD about Raygun.io, a cloud-based service to track unhandled errors in your software. It's a very interesting product that stands out from the competition (according to Mark's 3-minute market research) by supporting a variety of different technologies as well as looking pretty. The latter triggered a brief interesting discussion on the importance of the user interface, the Novopay debacle in NZ and how enterprise software (the likes of Oracle Forms, Adobe Lifecycle, Microsoft Sharepoint etc) now jump on the HTML5 bandwagon and what we'd expect to happen with that. JD explains the tech stack Raygun.io has been built upon and it's interesting to see that they've used Mono on an AWS infrastructure for the core parts of the backend. While we're talking about AWS, Kai jumps to Glacier and his experience of backing up into Glacier using a Mac OS X tool called Arq. The unavoidable Mercurial topic comes up again as well - Kai's got a Mercurial column in Tweet Deck now that's actively being monitored and JD chimes in that he used to use Mercurial a lot in the past because of the lack of good Git tooling on Windows, too. However in the last 12 months that has changed, in particular because of Github providing a lot of good services (if one is willing to still use the command-line). Side note: Atlassian's SourceTree is available on Windows now, too - only supporting Git (and not Mercurial) at this stage though.