Scaffolding Culture

Spotify

So Spotify finally launched in the United States after much anticipated wait. This is something a lot of us have been waiting for because the issues here in the US regarding streaming music is a mess. We have a few options, such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker and so forth for our free, streaming options. But it’s time to graduate from being cheap and get real with our streaming music options. Gone are the days of having to pay $0.99 for that one song that I want out of a whole album which really detours me from even buying music. The fact that music has gotten so bad is my excuse of why I refuse to hand over any money to most of these artists these days.

But why has it taken this long? Why did’t we have Spotify five or six years ago? Well we did. I used to be a huge fan of Yahoo! Music which had a decent collection of music for about $7/month. But the catalog wasn’t as big. We also had options with Napster and Rhapsody.

Honestly, I think people just haven’t been ready to understand the concept that the RIAA does not want anyone to own their music anymore. No one wanted to pay a month premium for music they don’t own physically or can’t touch. That’s always been the old mentality. People wanted to to be able to own that CD so they could rip it to their hardrive, make copies, whatever. It was theirs.

With the explosion of mobile, we can now still have our music when we want, how we want these days. If I want to listen to music on my computer at work, I just login to the app. At the gym? Just fire up the iPhone app. At home? You can purchase many of the speaker systems like Sonors that have these services integrated.

Now we’re at this state in the music industry where for a small premium we can have all our music when we want, how we want and where we want it’s here to stay and you can kiss your old music collection goodbye.

Google+

I’ve been away from blogging for a few days because I’ve been playing with the new Google+ social stream.

I have to admit I really dig it and loving the set of features Google has introduced. The fact I immediately define a circle that a user belongs to upon adding them is a nice touch, which is opposite of how Facebook interacts with Lists.

In my opinion Facebook has really lost a lot of value as far as the useful information I absorb from those on my friends list. The updates are very one sided and typical are just rants or complaints. I feel I’m getting a much higher level of context with Google+.

Google+

PizzaHacker

This is one of the reasons I love living in San Francisco. There is a guy here who calls himself the PizzaHacker, who considers himself an official pie slinger. Using only the freshest and organic ingredients he shows up at specific designated spots throughout the city during a time frame and creates pizza masterpieces for you to buy.

Apparently these pizzas are the real deal. According to fellow Yelpers, the pizzas are amazing. He cooks them in this mobile oven called the FrankenWeber which is a 22.5” Weber Charcoal Grill that was converted into a mini mobile wood burning pizza oven.

This week he’s going to be at Bloodhound which is one block away from me so I’m definitely giving him a shot.

Making a Continuous Deployment Model Succeed

So I’m not going to go into the specifics of what a continuous delivery model is or what it’s supposed to do. I wanted to talk about what I felt could make a continuous delivery model succeed.

Read more »

We Need Front End Developers!

Are you a front end developer? We need kickass rockstar front end guys (or girls) to come help us out at Ancestry.com. We are a big company, with great revenue that really is engineer focused.

Lots of great perks that you would get at a startup and we’re located in the tech hub of South Park area in San Francisco (think TechCrunch, Github, Yammer, Splunk, etc)

Check out the opening here and let me know if interested.

Amazon Web Services Summit 2011

I attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2011 yesterday in San Francisco and had a good time.  I thought it might be a bit introductory but I actually gained some insight on new services that are being used by companies in a very successful way.

The theme of the talks was definitely cloud and scalability.  I had the change to talk with CEO and founder of Optimizely which is an AB test tool which looks very promising and I definitely want to make use of such as great tool which runs on top of Amazon web services.

Even though I’ve made heavy use of other AWS services I have a clear picture of Amazons direction and how well they really listen to their customers!

WCF WebSockets

Update: I have moved the code snippets to a Github gist because of design constraints of my blog. It’s better that way ;)

So one of my new hobbies is using Node.js, which is an uber awesome event driven server side JavaScript engine (whew). Anyway, I hit a point where I wanted to use Node.js with WCF and was thinking how I would be able to interact with my service layer (WCF) to send asynchronous events back to the client in a similiar manner that Node.js does.

WCF WebSockets Prototype

Microsoft has released a prototype which gives initial support for WebSockets, pretty damn cool. Check it out here. Effectively you can now do something like this:

Gist

So with some magic, and a few lines of code you can quickly create a WCF host that will listen for connections via an HTML 5 WebSocket and echo back the value. Neat, huh? Now a quick demo of a client.

Gist

With Microsoft releasing IE9 today, we’re one step closer to all browsers supporting these insanely cool HTML 5 features.

Breakdown for 2011

Since 2010 was not the greatest of years, I’m really looking forward to 2011. I think I’ve had better luck with odd years so I want to do my annual post of resolutions. Since I haven’t imported my original wordpress blog here yet I don’t have the original list to mark off what I’ve done. Once I do I’ll re-update this post.

• Fully embed myself in unit testing as much as possible
• Bring innovative ideas to my new job
• Begin exercising daily
• Go to burning man
• Write a project using jQuery + MongoDB + NodeJS and push it live
• Pay off my financial dues completely
• Be more positive

For now, these are my high priority items but I will update this post as I think of more.