2 Devs from Down Under

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.

So, we're finally back. Episode 35 is all about Go and we're joined by Marc Esher (who was on the podcast before).  After some a quick run through some "things of today" (that Kai clearly won this time), we get started and try to explain what Go is and its place in the universe of programming languages. We ramble on talking about specific features of the language, what individuals like or dislike about it and how each of us uses Go. Towards the end, we're discussing package management issues with Go but then run out of time to dive into more details and a variety of other topics on our list. However, here's a good amount of links for further reading and on some of the stuff we didn't get to... Getting started: Start: http://golang.org/ Go in-browser tour: http://tour.golang.org/#1 Intro to how to write go code: http://golang.org/doc/code.html  Effective Go: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html Go language spec (quite readable): http://golang.org/ref/spec Some code to read: http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/12/27/code-to-read-when-learning-go/ List of Go projects: https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects#Frameworks_and_Toolkits Cross-compilation with Go: http://dave.cheney.net/2012/09/08/an-introduction-to-cross-compilation-with-go Go Packages and Libraries:http://godoc.org/ http://go-search.org Web Framework: Martini Testing: GoConvey Package Management: GPM  Generics: Gen  URL routing: Mux  Goon (GAE specific)  Community:Go slack community: https://gophers.slack.com/ #go-nuts on Freenode (IRC)

So Kai was meant to put this episode up months and months ago, but he decided to go travelling instead and it has languished since then. So I'm going through the notes now and hopefully I managed to write down everything we talked about. Kai finished off the Data Mining with Weka MOOC recently, and talks about his experience. Mark recommends (probably yet again), the A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining online book. Mark realises he's an idiot when it came to immutability and Clojure, and ends up rewriting his library. See this ticket and this blog post for details. Mark was heading off to CampJS at the time (yep, it was that long ago we recorded this). Mark talks about Google App Engine (apparently I'm doing all the talking here). What specifically I talk about I can't remember.  From the notes it looks like Managed VMs and the Asia Pacific data centre. Kai tries to tie Heartbleed to ColdFusion. It's doesn't work. I think that about covers it!  I think I'm now going to listen to the podcast again, just so I can remember what we said. Oh yeah, I'm not unemployed any more, either.

This recording was actually supposed to happen before the Holidays. But on the morning, Mark was turned into a domestic goddess for the day by his lovely wife, so we had to postpone. Episode 33 is about "stuff". Among other things we learn that Mark has no bloody idea of proper board gaming and that he thinks Articulate and Risk are good board games. They are not.  (i) Note to myself (Kai): There'll be a board game episode soon.(ii) Note to Diane, Amy, Mark and myself: We need to catchup either in Melbourne or Wellington and play some games. We talk a bit about Go and Core.Async and how to get started with Go and how to run Go on the Raspberry Pi. We also talk about TDD and BDD in CFML because Kai was playing with the new Testbox framework from the team behind Coldbox (Spoiler: It looks really, really good) Finally we also chatted about our conference calendar for the year: Kai:Webstock 2014 (Wellington) cf.Objective() (Minneapolis) (speaking) Scotch on the Rocks (Edinburgh) (speaking) Webinale or Int'l PHP conference (Berlin) (topics submitted) Pycon AU (Brisbane) CFCamp (Munich) Mark:Lambda Jam AU Strange Loop (St. Louis)

This episode was about random stuff we're working on or playing with when not necessarily coding for money. Some (more or less) interesting stuff we came up with:Xmonad - a window manager system for Linux:  If Xmonad looks interesting to you - here's something similar for OS X: Slate  Wordpress (Mark has a new blog...): https://github.com/markmandel/ansible_wordpress Raygun.io CFML: https://github.com/TheRealAgentK/raygun4cfml Mark's "Skype-replacement-that-will-rule-all-chats" based on Clojure, Clojurescript, AngularJS, Elastic Search and some other bits and pieces... Good AngularJS book: http://www.packtpub.com/angularjs-web-application-development/book Kai's trying to integrate his Phillips Hue lights with a Raspberry Pi via Python AirPi, the weather station kit Kai's waiting for to arrive. KiwiJS - a JS-based game engine for 2D-platform jump&run&shoot games: http://www.kiwijs.org  Here's the very interesting talk Mark mentioned about reactive programming. Finally, vote for cf.Objective() 2014 topics:  https://trello.com/b/4M6JSoyL/cf-objective-call-for-speakers-2014

G'day, it's been a while. Today's episode features our first 2DDU Technology Radar. Oi? What? The guys at Thoughtworks have recently gained a lot of well-deserved fame for doing their Technology Radar. It's essentially a structured list of "stuff" to use, look at, evaluate or be careful with when it comes to technology. It contains everything from processes via platforms and tools up to specific technologies and languages. Here's our personal view on technologies: the 2DDU Technology Radar. It's a long episode, nearly 1 hour and 50 minutes. Feel free to agree or disagree with our views in the comments, discussion is very appreciated. If you want to look at the list of technologies we're talking about while listening to the episode you're very welcome to use our published Google Doc to do so. Have fun!

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.

After nearly 4 months of "summer break" (yeah, right), we're back. We actually managed to talk about a few really interesting things: Conferences we attended this year (Mark: RubyConf AU, Kai: Webstock) and conferences either or both of us plan to attend. The latter is a rather long: PyCon AU, cfObjective, D2Wc, Strangeloop, CFCamp, Lambda Jam Brisbane and YOW! Melbourne. Distributed Version Control - what's the future of Mercurial (looking at the vast success of Git) and what are the options to host Mercurial in-house after Kiln on premise doesn't seem to be actively sold anymore to new clients IntelliJ 12.1 is out - what's new and which plugins have we experienced to work well/not that well yet? Ruby/JRuby vs. Python/Jython - what's the story with some languages being very popular on the JVM and others not so much? Some CFML-related news: Railo 4.1 beta is out there (and looks great), CF 10 is available on Amazon AWS (finally) and Adobe CF 11 alpha is coming soon. Error tracking with Raygun.io and Mark's efforts in OpenGL and LWJGL. Here are some more links: Clojure Workshop before Lamba Jam in Brisbane The "surprise" link for Bootstrap users (listen to the podcast first) Kai's CFML provider for the Raygun.io error tracking system If all goes according to plan we're back in two weeks. Have a great weekend!

So we're taking on a pretty controversial topic, but one that has been talked about a lot in the blog-o-sphere, and something we have touched on tangentially in the past. Here is the list of articles we discuss during the podcast: CFML 2012: State of the Platform State of ColdFusion Platform in 2012 CFML - Too Little, Too Late? Sean said that Nick said that Fusion Authority said... Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress Thoughts on "Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress" by Stofke on wheels The Last cf.Objective(ANZ) We talk about our perception of the decline of CFML, specifically in Australia and globally, as well as thoughts on whether or not CFML as a whole can pull out of it, what we think the major CFML backers can do about it, and what we think you should be thinking about as a developer in the CFML community. We expect this to invoke some differing opinions - so while we welcome the discourse, please remember to be civil.

In this episode we are joined by the venerable Mark Drew where we talk about his favourite features in Railo 4, what his favourite IDE is and the interesting relationship between Adobe ColdFusion and Railo's CFML engine. It's an interesting conversation all around, and live talks often are, including plenty of audience participation. Kai also admits to his strange relationship with cats. Update from Kai: Towards the end of the episode there's a bit of an uproar in regards to Cats that look like Pinups. Please note that the content might or might not offend you. You've been warned :)

Today Kai and I were very happy to have Marcin Szczepanski and Phil Haeusler join us for a panel discussion on the topics that they will be presenting on at the upcoming cf.Objective(ANZ) conference. Marcin gave us a quick run through of the advanced feature of FW/1 that he will be showing off, and Phil provided us with a synopsis of his talk on Strategies for effective mobile data communication. The conversation continues into some interesting discussion of mobile native vs. web apps and the various pros and cons. Resources FW/1 for Clojure FW/1 for PHP Chef Recipe for FW/1

Today we were joined by Kris Korsmo who is presenting at cf.Objective(ANZ) this year on Efficient Coding Using CFBuilder. We talk with him about IDEs, including ColdFusion Builder as well as other options (and we find out that Kai hates VIM). As well as that, we cover Azure, building Windows 8 apps, as well as Mark's new 2560x1440 Catleap Q270 Monitor. Resources: The IPS LCD Revolution Catleap Q270 Whirlpool thread

As per usual, we are conducting speaker interview for the wonderful cf.Objective(ANZ) conference! On the panel today we have Andrew Mercer who is presenting Work, ReST and Play, about REST based webservices, Justin McLean who is presenting Android Application Development with Java and Richard Turner-Jones who is presenting on Mobile Application development using PhoneGap. We talk to each of them about their history as programmers, and get some of the details on each of their presentations as well. It's a lively discussion, so tune in!

We return after a long hiatus with another episode! This episode continues to take us on our exploration of other programming languages. We discuss the work that Mark has been doing with Ruby and JRuby, including integrating it with his ColdFusion project and SOLR as well. This segways into a discussion on Platform as a Service's like Heroku and their position in highly available and scalable applications. Kai mentions some of the issues he was having around databases when he was mucking around with NodeJS, and asks our listeners to comment on any possible solutions they may know about. We make note of the fact that Sean Corfield will in Australia soon, and will be presenting at events in Sydney and Melbourne. Looks like both will be packed houses! Kai took his hand to compiling Railo 4 from scratch, and talks about the issues he faced trying to do that. We also discuss several events that we are attending / attended: MSFT TechEd NZ Strangeloop cfObjective(ANZ) Resources Compile Damnit Github: railo-build 12 Factor Apps

We got the wonderful opportunity to talk to the illustrious Sean Corfield this week, which was a great delight and pleasure. Continuing with our exploration of "What would happen if ColdFusion died tomorrow", we explore further into the Clojure programming language, as well functional programming, and Lisps as a whole. We discuss with Sean the reasons behind why you would want to use a Functional programming language, over Object Oriented, the reasons why they have had increasing popularity over the last few years, as well as how you can integrate Clojure into your CFML applications. We also go a little deeper into how you would structure a Functional programming application and the tools that you would use to develop with Clojure. Make sure to check the bottom of this post, we have ALOT of resources to link to. If you have any questions regarding what we talked about on the podcast, please feel free to add a comment, and we'll make sure that Sean notices. Also, if you are looking for a job, and want to work with Mr. Corfield himself, the company he works for World Singles is hiring! Two positions are available: Back end, data-centric Front end, design + CFML Resources We have so many, that it needed it's own section! Clojure Home Page CFMLjure Project Page Emacs Free Course on Functional Programming with Scheme: mitpress, udemy Try Clojure Clojure Koans 4Clojure Programming Clojure (2nd edition) Clojure in Action Clojure Programming Joy of Clojure If you have any more you would like to add, please feel free to add a comment!

So in this episode, we propose the following hypothetical scenario: Adobe decides that it’s EOL’ing ColdFusion, without open sourcing it. Micha, Denny, Gert and Mark Drew all crash into the ocean in a tragic plane accident (they should really fly separately) and we discover that the OpenBD corporation is over an Indian burial ground, and everyone disappears in what looks like a horrific massacre, but no bodies can be found. So essentially, CF is about as dead as it could possibly get. What do you do? Can you keep your applications with the platform you are on? Do you have to move? Can ColdFusion be resurrected and/or continued? Do you have to move to another language - and if so, which one? It's a fairly interesting discussion topic, as it really forces you to look outside of "CFML-land", and make a proper examination of the offerings that currently exist, which is something that not a lot of us do (present company included). As per always, we welcome any comments and or discussions - so please feel free to add comments to this blog post. Also - if you have experience with any of the languages we have talked about on the show (or some we haven't), and think it would be an interesting addition to the podcast, please get in touch, we would love to have you on. Links to some items we referenced in the show: Adobe Support Program TIOBE Language Index GitHub Language List StackOverflow Top Tags High Availabilty Clojure West Conference The StrangeLoop Conference Also, don't forget - we'll be at cf.Objective(ANZ) which is the 1st and 2nd of November this year!

While we start off talking about Kai's new Android phone, in this episode, we mainly talk through various topics relating to Adobe technologies, and the Adobe business. Moving from what is going on with Apache Flex, to the state of Flash on Linux as well as discussing the pending Java 6 EOL and how that may impact the also pending ColdFusion 10 release the conversation quickly start turning to the overall direction of Adobe, and what factors really drive a public company. At the end of the podcast we also have a teaser for what we'll be talking about in the coming weeks - But you'll have to listen to the show to find out what it is! :)

The 2DDU podcast has returned in 2012, with an in depth discussion of all thew new bits and pieces that can be found in the public beta release of ColdFusion 10! We go through all the new functionality we can find documented about ColdFusion 10, and discuss which pieces we like, don't like, love and hate, and what sort of use cases we can think of for each of them. If you haven't had a chance to play with the public beta yet, this should be an interesting listen, and even if you have - Listen anyway! :) As always, comments and questions are welcome!

In a rapid series of pre-holiday recordings we're proud to present episode 18 of "2 Devs from Down Under". This episode is pretty much all about Flex. Mark and I are joined by Dirk Eisman, a friend of mine who's a Flex developer from Germany. Dirk and I have a quite long history from being very early adopters of Flex in Central Europe around 2003 and 2004 (we actually think the respective companies we worked for - and Dirk still is with - were kind of responsible for every single one of the few sales of Flex 1 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland :) Dirk was recently invited to Adobe's Flex community summit. After having discussed the history of Flex, the pros and cons of various past and present licensing models, we naturally move on to what happened at Adobe in November 2011, what the future of Flex might be within the Apache Incubator and our personal thoughts about trusting Adobe and how each of us would deal with and be involved with Flex in the future. Be aware that at some point pink fluffy bunnies are mentioned. Dirk on Twitter Note (1): Unfortunately we forgot to talk about New Model Army (we ran out of time anyway, though). Best band ever! Fact! Note (2): This was the first ever episode of our podcast that we actually edited post-recording. The reason was not swearing, blurbing out secrets or anything alike. It was just as simple as Dirk having a microphone/Skype issue that we fixed and it took around 2-3 minutes. Being nice and in holiday mood we thought we'd just edit it out. That being said - the policy of us being an unedited/semi-live podcast is still in effect! :-)

This was an interview that we were really, really excited about. We had the chance to interview Kirill Safonov, who is responsible (amongst other things) for the CFML plugin for the IntelliJ IDE. If anyone follows Kai or Mark on twitter, you will probably know that they have both really started to enjoy developing ColdFusion with the IntelliJ IDE, so this was a great opportunity to pick the brain of the guy that helps direct where this project is going. We had a great chat with Kirill about the history of the CFML plugin, as well as a roadmap for the future. It was very interesting to hear that the roadmap for the plugin is very much driven by the community, i.e. bugs in the bug tracker, and discussions on the mailing list. Our favourite IntelliJ plugins also were discussed, although if any listeners want to chime in with their favourites, please feel free to do so in the comments! Resources: IntelliJ CFML Plugin Feature List Mailing List Bug Tracker Kirill on Twitter Kirill on Email JetBrains Blog

In this episode, we come to you with a live recording from the cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex conference, joined by the always information Adobe Evangelist Terry Ryan. Not only was this the first time that Kai and Mark were in the same country to record a podcast (not to mention the same room), it was their first time in front of a live audience (we swear it's not a laugh track). We talk with Terry about the recent news regarding Flex being donated to the Apache foundation, and what that means for Flex and Flash as a whole.  We also pick his brains on the next version of ColdFusion codenamed Zeus, and see if we can get him to reveal anything extra about the release. As expected, there is a lot of back and forth with the audience, and plenty of entertaining comments, including Mark stating that "nobody reads twitter", and Terry mentioning that "Linux users don't appreciate aesthetics" - all in good fun, of course :) Unfortunately the sound quality is not the best, as we are not that experienced with live recording, however, we hope you enjoy the content and the crazy antics.

I don't want to take too much of the excitement away from you guys listening to our little, friendly neighborhood podcast this time, but expect some ranting on various levels: Kai had some interesting experiences with Adobe's customer support after Adobe's software activation (resp. a failure in it) made Kai having no activated Creative Suite licenses anymore, then Mark and Kai agree on how ridiculous it is having to deal with DRM'ed ebooks in a lot of scenarios (besides Kindle, which actually works quite well) and then Mark gets into a rant on Adobe showing the broadcast of the MAX 2011 keynote in a loop and not on demand. We also talked the good things that happened at MAX and the implications Adobe's push into the HTML5/CSS/JS developer communities has on the large crowd of Flash/Flex developers. Make sure you listen up to the end - there's a challenge in which we ask you to leave a comment if you haven't ever met us in person. There's a bet included - I need more than 15 people to leave a comment to win! Go for it, please! :)

And again Mark and I ran a session with two guests - coincidentally both speakers at cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex 2011: Sandy Mamoli and Phil Haeusler. Yet again Mark proved that he struggles to pronounce European last names with umlaut-replacements correctly (well, he's usually not even close) and yet again Mark found a new approach to introduce me weirdly at the beginning of the show. We talked about Sandy's and Phil's sessions which basically deal with agile technical concepts (in Sandy's case) and geolocation/GIS (in Phil's case). Phil explained a few of the basic concepts of geolocation, we got into chats of him FB- and GIS-stalking his children when they're older (which Mark seemed be very interested in picking up to monitor his future offspring :) and general privacy discussions re use and abuse of such data. Sandy points out that her talk is not going to be an agile introduction, but rather in introduction is some technical practices that people regularly use within agile workflows. Most of them are actually best practices for any development process, such as unit testing, continuous integration and more. When Mark brought up the idea that he and I should talk about our sessions as well we got into a discussion on A/B testing and if/how it can be seen as an agile technical practice. Not sure if we reached any agreement on that though. I introduced my JVM tuning topic and one of the comments I got from Sandy was: "wow. and you can talk about that for 45 minutes?  VERY impressive". Thanks Sandy - I'm always trying to please :-) Two jobs: CF Developer in Melbourne and Flex/Java developer with GIS knowledge in Brisbane.

This is another episode in which Mark and I are talking to some of the speakers that are going to attend and present at cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex this year. Today we're discussing a variety of topics: General concepts and pros/cons of version control (Dennis Clark), Test-driven development for ColdFusion developers using MXUnit (Gavin Baumanis) and task-oriented workflows within Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder (Mike Henke). As usual it came to a lot of spin-off threads such as why Subversion is still relevant (Gavin is the Patch Manager for the Subversion project), how the Farcry guys work when it comes to version control and why they still use Subversion and some other bit and pieces. One interesting project to link to would be the Ant4CF library, a set of ANT tasks to use together with ColdFusion. Finally, I won. After being introduced by Mark as "intellectual" this time (first small win), I won our bet that we had more than 2 US-based listeners. A lot of comments on the Episode 12 blog post proved my point and also proved that Mark clearly can't count :)

Yet another speaker panel from cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex! We're joined by the fantastic crew of Bjorn Schultheiss, Geoff Bowers (our first return guest) and Robin Hilliard who joined us to give us an introduction to the topics they are presenting at the conference. This leads us to talk about designing testable Flex code, new feature in the Farcry framework and implementing domain specific languages using custom tags in ColdFusion. From there, things digress into a history lesson on Spectra, and we also have a talk on how to find quality developers, irrespective of programming language. Kai also made me link to this video. Apparently it's the game he was trying to explain in the podcast ;-) More speaker sessions to come!

We finally managed to record episode 11 after a hiatus of nearly 2 months, geeez! This was mainly due to a combination of work trips, vacations and renovation projects on my (Kai) end, so don't blame Mark for any of this. In the current episode we're starting a series of speaker interviews (or rather speaker panels) for cf.Objective + Flex (ANZ). The first session features Tanya Gray, AJ Dyka, AJ Mercer and Andrew Meyers. We start off by discussing mobile web development frameworks like SenchaTouch, jQuery Mobile and jqTouch. Flash and Flex on mobile becomes a topic of interest along the way as well and there's a common perception that the Flex components are "not quite there yet" when it comes to performance. From there we move on to automated deployments and build scripts for cloud-based CFML development and the pros and cons of various version control systems. We talk about cloud hosting offerings and RESTful service design as well as development adhering to the idea of REpresentational State Transfer. Kai gets another chance to rant about SOAP-based web services, which he happily jumps on :-) We close the panel discussion with a chat about Mura CMS, its extension/plugin mechanism and CFML-based content management systems in general. Thanks a lot to Tanya and the three Andrews for taking the time to have a chat with us. There are some more sessions with cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex speakers in the pipeline - September will be a busy podcasting month :-)

With Google+ coming out the other week, and ColdFusion developers jumping on it like crazy, we thought we would have a chat with Elliott Sprehn, who used to be a ColdFusion developer for Teratech, but has more recently been working in the Mountain View office of Google. Elliott was part of the team that worked on the super-funky send feedback feature that can be found in the bottom right hand corner of Google+, as well as in a few other Google properties, like YouTube. We announce that ColdFusion now has a new product manager - Rakshith N, which is wonderful news! Rakshith has been with the ColdFusion engineering team for a number of years, and has now stepped up to be the product manager. Congratulations Rakshith! From there we go into a discussion of unit testing with Javascript (this will change the way you write Javascript!), and some of Elliot's favourite frameworks for doing unit testing with Javascript - Javascript Test Driver and Jasmine. Finally we talk about an incredibly powerful, although not very well known, MVC and Dependency Injection (and SO much more), framework for client side Javascript that Elliott has been involved with - called AngularJS (there is even a quote from Ray Camden on the website), talk about some of it's features and how it does the magic that it does. Resources: Elliott on Twitter Elliott on Google+ Events: Edge of the Web - 28th & 29th of July 2011 cf.Objective(ANZ) announces dates, and the an additional Flex Track Jobs: NZ Herald / APN Online - Coldfusion Developer

After being gone for a little while, we are back with our ninth episode! After discussing Mark's new dog, Sukie, and how he's now also addicted to turntable.fm (as I'm sure Kai will soon be as well) we get into some deeper discussion of more relevant topics, such as how Ray Camden has joined Adobe (Yay!), and how Adobe has dropped support for Linux (Boo!). From there we get into an in-depth discussion about A/B Testing (a.k.a Multi-Variant Testing). Including what it is, why you would want to use multi variant testing, what tools are currently available for doing multi variant testing, and what makes some better than others, from aspects such as capabilities as well as testing and deployment. Mark then announces a new Open Source project, Squabble, which is a service side Multi-Variant suite that is written in ColdFusion that he has been working on with Ezra Parker and Josh Wines, that helps combat some of the issues that they have faced using some other multi variant testing tools out there. Resources: Goodbye, Google Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap Google Website Optimizer Visual Website Optimizer Optimizely Events: Sydney Adobe Platform User Group - ColdFusion Builder 2 Wellington Creative Suite User Group - Adobe Camera Raw

Mark recently got back from the amazing cf.Objective() conference in the US. We discuss the content that was part of the keynotes, as well as the new features that were revealed about the next version of ColdFusion - including the revelation that the next version of ColdFusion is coming sooner than expected... We then go through some of Mark's favourite sessions, including, but limited to: Undocumented and Off Script: ColdFusion & Ehcache ORM Zen Implementing an In-Memory Distributed Cache Using ColdSpring AOP and Ehcache Advanced Web Application Security Test Driven Development in JavaScript with JsTD and Jasmine What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?) Intro to AngularJS, JavaScript Done Right Resources: cf.Obective() Keynote Recording Events: Adobe Creative Camp New Zealand 2011

This week ColdFusion Builder 2 was released, along with Creative Suite 5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5. We have a chat about Builder 2 and the features we like in it, and also talk through some functionality we would like to see in the product as well. We also have a talk about price discrepancies between the U.S.A and Australia and New Zealand, and why that may be. Mark also received his Samsung Tab 10.1v, so a discussion about Android Tablets ensues. We also do a quick shout out to the streaming radio station CodeBass, and the guys and gals who wrote the MediaSlurp player for listening to Adobe related audio and video content. A few other topics pop up as well, but a pretty straight forward episode this week! Jobs: Daemon - Web Developer (Sydney) Cupidmedia - Intermediate CF Developer (Gold Coast) Events: May 24 - CS 5.5 launch in Wellington - Flash Platforum User Group and Creative Suite User Group Late May early June - ANZ Adobe CS 5.5 Roadshow

What an amazing podcast! We were very privileged to have a panel of incredible people with us today to talk about Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD). A huge thanks to Bill Shelton, Marc Esher, Michael Labriola and Sandy Mamoli for agreeing to join us, and participating in one of the most interesting, and thought provoking discussions on Agile process and Test Driven Development I've every been a party to. We discuss testing from a variety of angles, why is it good, what are good ways to implement it, automation, how it factors into your process, as well as talking about the Agile process in general, how it can fit into certain organisations and business structures, and what problems its attempting to solve. Brace yourselves for some good-to-honest learnin'! Below are the resources we discussed in the podcast. MxUnit FlexUnit Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers Google Testing Blog GreenHopper

We're back again! Starting off this conversation, we discuss Mark's (and probably soon Kai's) addiction to Spiral Knights, which is an incredibly simple and fun Diablo style freemium cross platform MMO (Friend Mark as 'Neurotic', if you play too). Kai takes us through his experience at WebDU this year, and talks about how much he enjoyed the conference. We have a good discussion about his presentation on developing for mobile platforms, ranging from phones to tablets, and the pros and cons to different approaches. The Amazon outage (which is still ongoing) becomes an interesting topic, and diverges into discussion about decentralised version control (i.e. what happens when your source control repo is stored on a server that goes down). Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP comes up as well, and we have a good chat about the Flex ecosystem, and IDE's in general, along with the discussion of an interesting e-week article. Finally, we announce a ColdFusion Job in Melbourne, and the CS5.5 Asia Pacific Roadshow.

Another long episode! We have a long and winding discussion about running and developing for ColdFusion on platforms other than Windows - generally speaking, Linux (Ubuntu, Mark) and Mac (Kai), which takes us well into how we set up our local development environments. Details like how we use virtual machines, what Eclipse plugins we use, version control clients and the like are talked about as well. Late to the party, we have a talk about the ol' cfscript vs cftag debate, and how we feel about how people can format their code. Surprisingly no fireballs were thrown in this exchange, as usually this tends to provoke incredibly heated discussions!  As we all know, which line a { goes on, is very important stuff! Lastly, we talk about the recent broo-ha-ha over whether or not open source developers should be taking donations (Spoiler: we tend to side on the "if you give stuff away for free, do what you like" camp). And lastly, we put a call out for more people to comment on this site to our podcasts! We love the feedback and being able to interact with our audience, so please comment / send us any suggestions or questions that you have, we'd be happy to talk about them.

After a delay of about one week or 10 days due to Mark moving and me traveling around in Australia to see clients and to attend a course, here's episode 3 of your friendly neighbourhood podcast from Down Under. This was an epic recording of about 90 minutes length - here you go and have some fun for the weekend. This time we have a special guest: Geoff Bowers - the man behind Sydney's awesome webDU conference and benevolent dictator of the Farcry CMS community. We talk to Geoff about webDU 2011 which is actually coming up quite soon (April 14/15 2011 in Sydney - go register as long as there are tickets left). From there we jump into all sorts of topics - one is Agile and how we use (or don't use) it. We talk about the ghost of Spectra (again), how and why Spectra failed and that some of Spectra's good ideas became part of Farcry CMS. Another big topic today is the next version of ColdFusion. Adobe made a few of their ideas for "CF Next" public at SOTR 2011 earlier this month and we went into discussing a few of those features that are to be expected. ColdFusion Builder 2 is out there in public beta as well - and it gets a mention! Finally there are a bunch of community announcement re the New Zealand CFUG, the next meeting of the Wellington Flash Platform User Group, some changes in the Melbourne Adobe community as well as the next Brisbane Flash Platform Group meeting in April. As a reminder to all of you involved with the Adobe community in Australia and New Zealand: we're more than happy to mention your event - you just need to let us know about it!

Another instalment from the 2 developers from Downunder. Kai and I talk about a variety of topics, including the books Driving Technical Change, and the ColdFusion Anthology, detour into talking about Adam Lehman's appointment to being the Flash Builder product manager, Kai attending Webstock 2011 and among other things playing the game Werewolf, swerve into discussing software certifications, SOLR, ColdFusion Memory Leaks and local events (and some other stuff I can't think of right now). There should be something in there for everyone!

This was always just meant to be an experiment. It was fun and we liked it (even though we recorded it at 6 a.m. in Mark's timezone) - here you go. In this episode we're talking about cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010, what's going to happen with cf.Objective(ANZ) 2011, we're covering the big announcement of Adam and Allison passing over the stewardship of ColdFusion to a new team and speak about some other random things: What's Oracle doing to Java and why and why Kai thinks Mercurial lends itself much better to corporate, Windows-based development teams than Git. Tell us if you like it and how you cope with our weird mishmash of accents - if you like us rambling on about stuff for about an hour every fortnight, we might take it on as a new hobby :) Please note: 2 dudes from downunder is a "work in progess" - Any good suggestions welcome! UPDATE: Title is sorted. We're now "2 devs from downunder"!