JOE:
Turn your video off, Aaron. It hurts the audio quality.
LUKAS:
Please, for the love of god. [Laughter]
CHUCK:
Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 3 of Adventures in Angular. This week on our crew, we have Joe Eames.
JOE:
Hey, everybody.
CHUCK:
Aaron Frost.
AARON:
Hello.
CHUCK:
John Papa.
JOHN:
How's everybody doing?
CHUCK:
Lukas Ruebbelke? Totally slaughtered it, didn’t I?
LUKAS:
Lukas is all you needed, bro.
CHUCK:
Good. It can set me straight. We also have a special guest and that is Matias Niemel_.
MATIAS:
Saying the difficult names last, I guess?
CHUCK:
That’s right. So John, Lukas and Matias haven’t been on the show before. Do you guys wanna introduce yourselves? I'll let you sort out the order.
MATIAS:
Ok, so I can go first. My name is Matias Niemel_ and I started out with Angular on my blog yearofmoo.com. And after blogging about it for a bit, that lead me to work on the core team, nganimate and working in Dart and stuff like that. And overall, I really love Angular and I've done lot of contributing to it and lot of presentations, and keeping the momentum going.
AARON:
Awesome. What about John?
JOHN:
My name is John Papa, and I've been involved in a lot of technology in the last 15-20 years, running from database to middleware to front end. Most recently, I've been engulfed inside the SPA world – whether it's Angular, Knockout, or Backbone or what have you.
CHUCK:
SPA meaning Single Page App?
JOHN:
Yeah, that too. But I also do a lot of spas where I relax in water.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
[unintelligible]
MATIAS:
Yes, I'm from Finland.
JOE:
Matias is very comfortable with spas, right? Hanging out in the…
MATIAS:
Maybe not spas, but definitely saunas.
JOE:
Saunas, right.
MATIAS:
Yeah, it's a very cultural Finnish thing to have a sauna. Even the condos that I live in, there's a sauna here.
JOE:
Awesome.
MATIAS:
Every place I have been to, there has to be a sauna.
JOE:
And Lukas, do you wanna introduce yourself?
LUKAS:
Yes, my name is Lukas Ruebbelke, and I am in Phoenix, so I practically live in a dry sauna -- which
is kind of a cultural thing by geography. I was a Flex developer for almost ten years, and then I've been doing SPAs or basically HTML5 JavaScript web development for the last couple of years. I've been doing Angular for about two. And it still delights me; I learn new things almost every day. And I'm currently wrapping up AngularJS in Action, and I do some videos for egghead.io, and I'm a PluralSight author.
CHUCK:
Awesome.
AARON:
So, one thing we should mention is that Lukas and John are new panels on the show, so they'll be here weekly.
LUKAS:
Yay!
JOE:
Which is awesome.
CHUCK:
Yeah. And the reason that we have Matias here is that he and Aaron… and did you say that Lukas and John also were GDEs?
AARON:
Not yet, but they can be.
LUKAS:
Matias is going to nominate me as soon as we get off this call. As soon as I figure out what it is.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
JOHN:
Ooh, I'll like to be part of any club I can be part of. [Laughter]
MATIAS:
I think John Papa is in the Microsoft version of the GDE. Isn’t that right?
JOHN:
Yeah, I'm Microsoft MVP and Microsoft RD and couple other things, which probably don’t make a lot of sense. [Chuckles]
CHUCK:
We'll just slap on MD and PhD…
JOHN:
It seems like all these different communities have their own recognition programs for community awareness. I just generally like to have myself as the community guy, regardless of the technology, so. There’s an impression I get a GDE as well, so it may or may not be correct.
CHUCK:
So what does GDE stand for?
MATIAS:
Stands for Google Developer Expert.
AARON:
It's kind of Google’s first stab… I don’t know if it's their first stab. It’s their current stab at recognizing community members. You can become a GDE across like any of the Google technologies. So, Matias and I are GDES for Angular. But there's GDEs for Chrome, there's a lot of them for Dart, you have Google Glass GEDs… what else do you have GDEs for? I mean, everything. There’s SEO GDEs, AdSense GEDs. There's just a lot of GDEs. So a few months ago, we were at 83, but now, they went on a sprint to get a hold of a bunch of more. Now I think it's up at… do you know where it's at, Matias?
MATIAS:
No. I actually haven’t looked at the page recently. I'm not sure of the total number.
LUKAS:
So what I wanna know, (and this is pretty important) is do you get a t-shirt?
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
MATIAS:
I actually haven’t gotten a t-shirt in the mail yet, but there's a GDE meet up event in November. I can hopefully get some clothing then.
LUKAS:
Well, I hope you get some clothing *by then*, Matias. [Chuckles]
JOHN:
I just looked in the webpage; looks like there's 114 GDEs listed on the webpage.
AARON:
Ok yeah, 114. So we're up a little bit.
JOHN:
And to be clear, that’s not all in the same product; that’s across YouTube, Angular, everything.
CHUCK:
So I have to ask, why would anyone care? What do GDEs do?
AARON:
Why would anyone want to be a GDE?
CHUCK:
Or why do we care that Google has them? I mean, what are GDEs supposed to do that affect me as an Angular developer?
MATIAS:
So one of major factors is that they might not work for Google, but they are going to have an influence on the way the technology shifts. So if you are a big fan of Maps for example, and you wanna be a GDE on Maps, then your input will be put into consideration with the next reversions in the Maps and new features that come in -- potentially. It's not guaranteed, but you have a bigger say in the technology than somebody else who is not involved in the GDE community.
CHUCK:
Interesting.
JOHN:
So the big question everyone is going to have in this podcast is how can the 1 million people listening to this podcast all become GDEs?
AARON:
Right. “You're going a GDE! And you're a GDE!”
MATIAS:
Kind of the way the process works is either a current GDE or Google employee needs to nominate you as a community member for the GDE process. And then you go through two rounds of interviews, and if they think that you kind of harbor those things that they look for, to kind of make an example out of, then you can get the official title. I don’t know if I answered your question though, but that’s kind of at the process of that you go through to become a GDE is to get nominated by somebody who works there.
JOHN:
And being in the Microsoft program (which is a similar type of developer community program), and actually I was on the other side when I worked for Microsoft that we actually helped run the program that they do, one of the things I think a lot of the members of these program do in general really benefit from is there is an annual GDE summit, Microsoft has their own what you call an ‘MVP Summit’. And one of the nice things about that is its chance for these people to kind of get some inside information and network and gather and really talk to each other, because otherwise, a lot of us just talk over Skype or Twitter.
AARON:
I think that’s been one of the cooler benefits for me is as a GDE, I mean, the interview process is really cool. One of the interviewers is a GDE and the other interviewer is a Google employee on the team that you are trying to be a GDE for. So my interview was with Brad Green, and he is cool. That was fun to get a chat with him. But also, they have a GDE briefings. We have to sign NDAs before we can go to GDE briefings, and they kind of talk to us about things that are in the works, and get our feedback, (like Matias was saying) they kind of prod you for feedbacks, and so you do get to influence technologies. And even if it's not like Angular, we've been in on like some Cloud ones and some Chrome ones where we've given feedbacks and other ones where we can feedback. And we weren’t even GDEs on that, but you are able to influence those technologies by being in those briefings. So it's pretty cool.
CHUCK:
I think the question that I really have though is it sounds cool to have kind of the insides and the access and to be able to talk to people at Google about projects that I really care about, but what I guess I don’t see is that why as an Angular developer, do I care that they have GDEs? Is there something that you guys do out in the community that will affect other people? I mean, you are writing documentation or speaking at Google events contributing in other ways that are a little bit more visible to me?
LUKAS:
So if I could jump in here, I'm an Adobe community professional and so again, (kind of a similar program) is I don’t think that you become a GDE and then you start to benefit the community -- I believe it's the other way around. You are already benefitting the community and you are already passionate about the technology and you are putting it out there. Matias is a really good example of that, where his yearofmoo.com blog was already providing massive value to the community through his blog, and then just doing work on the code base. And because of that, and because of the value he’s providing, he became a GDE. And so I think that it's more of a way to recognize somebody that is already very much community-minded in providing value to the community, and just doing that because they are passionate about the technology. And so, I think that that is the sequence of it is that it's not that you become GDE and then you start providing value; I think it's the other way around.
CHUCK:
Ok. So it's a way for Google to recognize people who are contributing to the community?
AARON:
Yeah.
CHUCK:
That makes me happier about it.
AARON:
Matias, do you want to add anything to that?
MATIAS:
No, you pretty much covered all the bits. As somebody who is contributing to the community, the act of contributing, you are doing based on your own passion and because you wanna give back to people who are trying to learn, but you need to have some form of feedback, right? So if no one is reading blog articles, then you'll quit. But maybe perhaps being a GDE is just another level of being recognized and that just pursues you to keep contributing to the community. That’s probably another way of looking at it.
AARON:
I think a great [unintelligible] of feedback loops by basically elevating yourself with other GDEs is that you get better feedback… and I mean, even having access to Angular team is when I started blogging, having their input just really made my work that much better. And so I think that’s indirectly how the community benefit is because if you become a GDE, then you have access to the other GDEs. And the camaraderie just kind of raises the bar as a whole, I believe.
JOE:
So Aaron, since you’ve been a GDE, does that mean that you can like ask Miško for cooking tips, since you have access to him now?
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
AARON:
Yeah, Igor has a weekly call where he talks about making crepes and as a GDE, you are on that call -- which is kind of cool.
AARON:
So Lukas, you are a GDE not because you want to contribute and get nominated like, “Ok, it's time to contribute.” You contributed before you got nominated. I mean, your contributions are what got you nominated, basically. And I think Matias is a good example. He was the first Angular GDE, and when I looked at the interview questions that we need to ask people who were interviewing for the GDE process, he fits like right into the ‘yes’ columns of all the questions they’re asking. They ask questions like, “Do you have a blog with a significant following?” And if you do, then that kind of influences the score. And they wanna see, “Are you a top influencer on the hash tags for your product on StackOverflow?” “Are you one of the top responders for Angular on StackOverflow?” That’s the question that we ask. “Have you written a book about the topic?” That’s the question that they ask. “Have you spoken at conferences?” And they want links to the conferences.
They actually ask significant questions to see how big are you, and are you really making it an effort in the community to influence for the better? Those are what most of the questions revolve around. And I usually ask those questions first because suppose I was interviewing Matias and I went to his blog and I could see all the stuff that he's talking about, the technical questions would have almost been secondary at that point, because through his blog, it would be clear that he understands the technology, right? So that’s kind of the interview process is, “Do you know your stuff?” And then, “How much have you taken it to the community?” “How much of an evangelist are you?” And if you are an evangelist, you are nominated.
JOHN:
I think one of the bigger things about this that’s really kind of under the covers is just the fact that there is GDE program and a product for Angular on this to me shows the rise where Angular has come from and its longevity in this too, because you don’t just create programs or products that don’t have that kind of momentum and staying power.
AARON:
That’s true.
MATIAS:
All of the stuff that Aaron was mentioning, like all of the sort of pieces that fit to make it to a good interview, you present them all in the form of something like ‘community CV’; that's essentially your resume in terms of what you’ve done for the community. And it's not like a regular resume, where you tell a bunch of experience; you just outline all the cool stuff you’ve done. And even putting something together, like that will realize for someone who has done a lot of work in the community how much work you’ve actually done. Like at the time where I wrote it, I think I had something like 12 presentations on Angular, and bunch of blog articles and a video of Lukas that we did for O'Reilly and all kinds of stuff. It all fits together. It's really cool. Even to take a moment and to reflect about how much of an influence you have on a particular technology in the community by putting together a paper like that makes you realize how much you’ve actually done.
JOHN:
Yeah, that’s true.
AARON:
So one last thing that I will mention. There is one other stipulation when they tell you, “Hey, you are
a GDE member.” Sometimes, or I guess often, technology teams at Google, (so in our case, the Angular team), they get asked to go to kind of regional conferences or local conferences. And if it is something that they feel is worth it but they can’t make it, they will ask the GDEs if they can go in their replace. There was a conference in Korea, and they asked Brad and Miško and Brad couldn’t go and Brad forwarded it to me. And I don’t know if you got that too , Matias, but he asked us if we could go and I was like, “I'll go to Korea,” but the dude quickly responded and he was like, “We don’t have money for just...” like “If Aaron, nevermind. We don’t want you to come anymore.” That was kind of a piece of response, but it was kind of cool to be asked to go…
LUKAS:
Ouch!
AARON:
I know. I was like, “I don’t know if I'll be excited about going, but that’s cool if you ask me.”
JOHN:
If you wonder why they did that though, part of it is probably just recognition of where the GDE is in some case because you know, if you ask somebody, “Hey, I wanna get Bill Gates to come to your conference, or Steve jobs.” And somebody says, “Hey, let me get their so and so,” if they don’t know who that is or what that group means… so I think part of that is just getting a recognition for what a GDE program stands for.
MATIAS:
Yeah, good point.
JOHN:
I’d be excited to have Aaron come talk to me.
AARON:
Well, I'm coming dude. So guys, I don’t know if you know. Lukas gave the funniest talk in ng-conf. Lukas and Matias, best talk ng-conf in my book. It was awesome.
LUKAS:
So ng-europe, stick around; we got something in the works.
JOE:
Oh, yeah?
MATIAS:
Everyday, he's bugging me. He has like this grand scheme of something we are going to plan and I'm just like, “I'm not going to get invited to another Angular conference if you keep pulling these things off,” so. [Chuckles]
AARON:
So you guys are going to ng-europe too?
LUKAS:
Yes, sir.
MATIAS:
Yes, sir.
AARON:
That’s very cool. When is that by the way?
MATIAS:
That one is in October.
AARON:
Ok, cool.
MATIAS:
Are you planning to have another Angular conference next year?
AARON:
Joe, do we talk about it now?
JOE:
No, not yet.
AARON:
Oh, come on.
JOE:
There will be ng-conf 2015. That will exist.
AARON:
So the site for registering for information about ng-conf 2015 is already up, but as far as talking about the dets, I'm going to throw one detail out there (and Joe, you can get mad at me), it's going to be Q1 of 2015, but yeah, if it's coming, you are about to get a lot of information in the next few months.
MATIAS:
Is it going to be at Salt Lake City again?
JOE:
Yes.
AARON:
Yes, it's going to be at Salt Lake City.
JOE:
We are the mecca of Angular. If you look at the analytics, we are the mecca of Angular.
AARON:
Salt Lake City per capita is the mecca for all JavaScript platforms, since like the browser selector wars. If you go back and you look at them, Salt Lake City has got more as like more searches per capita than any in the United States. It's a pretty big deal. It's always a big deal in JavaScript.
CHUCK:
That just shows that we don’t know what we want out here.
AARON:
And that’s the thing is it shows that we love JavaScript more than it shows that we are dumber and we have to Google it. I don’t know what it means, but it shows something. So yeah, we are going to do it there again.
LUKAS:
So can I push my luck? Is it going to be at the same venue?
JOE:
What would you think if it was?
LUKAS:
I thought the venue was fantastic.
MATIAS:
The only thing that got to me was the food poisoning.
CHUCK:
[Laughs]
AARON:
Well, we've got to deal with the food poison broker. We can bring that to wherever we go.
MATIAS:
I didn’t mean it in a positive way. [Chuckles]
AARON:
Oh ok. No, we can get ng-flu wherever we go.
JOE:
Yeah, ng-flu goes everywhere.
JOHN:
You may want to see if they can break a wall down too and make you some more room.
JOE:
[Chuckles]
CHUCK:
I have one more question. I was looking at the GDE page, and it says that you are a GDE for a year. What do they call you when you are done being a GDE?
JOHN:
Isn’t that when the secret service still follows you around and you get a detail for life?
CHUCK:
Something like that.
JOE:
Yeah, or are the two of you allowed to be on the same plane together?
CHUCK:
[Laughs]
AARON:
We just can’t touch each other.
JOE:
That’s probably pretty hard for you.
CHUCK:
[Laughs]
MATIAS:
It was easier before we weren’t GDEs. But now it's just complicated.
AARON:
The relationships are messing up. After GDE, I don’t know. I think like let’s say one of the GDEs takes off and gets involved and react, and they are not [unintelligible]…
CHUCK:
No.
MATIAS:
This is an example, right? You will be a GDE for just a few more months and then they'd reinterview you, and you’d probably would be like at the same level, and so they’d probably sit things through helping out.
AARON:
Matias, I'm going to say this. We haven’t actually said this. GDEs get a guaranteed ticket to Google I/O. That’s one of the bigger things that we didn’t even mention. You shouldn’t be a GDE just for that, but if that gets you motivated to contribute in the community and do all sorts of presenting and blog writing, and writing docs for the Angular team, then awesome. You deserve a ticket. So that’s one of the other perks.
JOHN:
So imagine if I'm a listener and I wanna talk to a GDE, what phone number to reach out to GDEs and ask them questions? How do I go about doing that?
MATIAS:
Great question. If you go to developers.google.com, there's a community question where you can see a list of Google developer experts. If you want one of them to do a hangout with you for maybe a user group or maybe you wanna know them and chat with them, if you go to that page, you'll see all of our information. It's got a map of where they are at in the world, so you could go and look and see if there are any GDEs near you. And like let’s say you run a user group, you could have a GDE come and present at your user group. But if you go to developers.google.com, that’s how you could get in touch with a GDE and chat with them, maybe get feedback from them, and find out if they can help you with your user group or come talk to you about the technology that you care about.
Like locally, I've had a couple of companies say, “Hey, we're thinking about converting to Angular. Come to talk to us about it,” and so you go and you kind of consult with them. You do a presentation and you consult with some of the changes with Angular. That's how you get in touch with GDEs through developers.google.com.
JOE:
So if I was having trouble figuring out why my directive is not working, then I could just call you, Aaron, and you can figure it out?
AARON:
Yeah, let me find my phone number really quickly… My phone number is…
JOE:
[Chuckles]
AARON:
If you need help, you can go to Stack Overflow, right? But if it was something like you’d talk to Stack Overflow and they couldn’t help you out on, I would be more than willing to help someone up. I think Matias is probably similar. The thing that they could figure out, I’d hang out with him and do a screen share and see if I could help them up. I actually did that last night, so yeah I would do that.
JOE:
So one of the things I’ve recently started to feel like is there needs to be GDEs that are Angular Microsoft GDEs. I had some guy ask me some questions about some really difficult thing with Visual Studio using Angular, and I just couldn’t figure it out because I haven’t used the latest version of the Visual Studio. So you know that whole thing about Angular and GDE, right? There's actually a lot of cross over technologies that Angular really affects because Angular doesn’t live by itself. There's a server piece somewhere. And there's a lot of different complexities with working with a different kind of server piece.
JOHN:
Recently I was working with some folks giving a class on Angular, and there were some 20 people in the class and I think there were 11 different IDEs. So just going through that was amazing; they had Java, PHP, .NET, Node, and Firebase, everything was going off with the backend. So I totally see that.
MATIAS:
The backend stuff is really interesting. I've done a lot of talks on the front end stuff, but my next talk at a conference here in Toronto where I live, I'm doing one on like various backends that you can use with Angular, starting to explore Node, .NET, PHP, as many backends as I can get my hands on. Rails as well, and Clojure and all kinds of stuff, just to explain how you can build like the appropriate backend for an MVC website that uses Angular.
CHUCK:
I wanna see one in Common Lisp.
MATIAS:
[Chuckles] There’s actually backends that worked directly with C. That will be fun to build something like that.
JOHN:
I think that’s really one of the beauties of what Angular really brings to the table is you now have these old fashion houses running in Java and .NET and other technologies, which is still wonderful, but in the past, they’ve kind of battled each other. And now there is something that kind of brings them together. It's not just Angular, but it's JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but I think Angular is the thing that’s kind of bringing them together going like, “You know what, we can build applications and who cares what’s in the back end?” And I really think it's a great thing.
JOE:
Agreed.
AARON:
Agreed, yes.
MATIAS:
Just the architecture of an MVC website is amazing, like how you can basically store static portions like the HTML code, the JS code, the CSS code, put that on the CDN, and then set up your API which is the backend code on just like a different domain, make them both live together as one website. And if you wanna scale the frontend, it's a CDN. It's trivial. You wanna scale the backend, you got something like Heroku to run your backend. And because they are very cheap and very easy to maintain and scale up the website compared to a website 5 years ago, which was everything was in the backend, everything was HTML being dished out to the browser.
JOHN:
And the costs are amazing… Because the backend, you wanna scale these things, you are sometimes talking millions of dollars to do these kinds of things. And on the front end, you are not hitting that kind of issue.
JOE:
Right.
MATIAS:
Yeah.
JOE:
So I got a question for you GDEs. Matias, you’ve been a GDE for a long time. Aaron, how long have you been a GDE?
AARON:
April.
JOE:
April. All right, so have you guys like… what's been different since you’ve been a GDE? Like how's it actually affected you directly?
MATIAS:
So I've had a few people from like a Google developer group reach out. And just as Aaron mentioned, some user groups will reach out and ask you to speak on their behalf and stuff like that. I've had a few instances of that. I was unable to make it to Google I/O, but I did get invites. And just having the sort of notifications and sort of introductions to other GDEs is a cool thing. It's just being part of the community. I think that it will pick up in the fall, when the GDE summit comes around, but for now it's just, I've been still doing the same stuff I've been normally doing; contributing to Angular and working on my blog and stuff like that. Now I know that it's also helping me in terms of being an Angular GDE.
AARON:
in addition to that, I think for me the coolest part has been by far the GDE briefings that they do, where it's just you and whenever other GDEs were interested in the specific topic, and you jump on a Hangout with some Google development team, they are going to some ideas with you, and kind of talk to about the stuff that you are working on, get your feedback whether you like it, how excited are you about it, what kind of changes do you like see to it, and being able to just kind of see stuff before it's out and have some feedback into it, that for me is [unintelligible]. I've never been involved in a training or feedback groups.
JOE:
So I would just like to say on behalf of the entire Angular community, thanks to you guys who have been GDEs and proven your contribution to Angular. Thanks for everything you guys have done.
LUKAS:
+1.
CHUCK:
All right. We are at our time limit, so I'm going to push us into the picks. Joe, do you wanna go first?
JOE:
I would love to go first. I got two picks; the first pick is by the time this gets released, this pick will have been over, and that is my talk at that conference. I'm going to be giving it on Monday, and this episode should come out like Wednesday? So, it will be two days late. I'm not just picking that conference because that conference is awesome, but I'm going to be speaking on Angular best practices at that conference. So, I'm going to pick that. And if you haven’t gone to that conference, you should definitely go. It's an awesome conference filled with bacon and waterslides -sometimes together.
My second and final pick is going to be Aaron Frost’s cellphone number which is 801-555-6532. [Laughter]
JOE:
Those are my picks.
CHUCK:
Awesome. Aaron, what are your picks?
AARON:
Can I go last?
CHUCK:
We kind of sprung this I think on our new hosts and guests, so I'll go and then I'll make you go.
AARON:
Yeah, you go then I'll go.
CHUCK:
Ok. So as many of you may or may not know, I'm actually a freelancer. I focus mainly on Ruby on Rails backend and I like to use Angular on the frontend where it makes sense, which most of the time, it does, even on some of the smaller projects. Anyway, I've been reading some of the books that really kind of bent my brain around in a different way, and it was stuff that I mostly knew and stuff that I mostly believe, but it was just kind of nice to hear it more or less explicitly stated, so I'm going to pick a few books here. The first one is called Rhinoceros Success, and it talks about choosing a goal and then basically charging ahead like a rhinoceros to reach a goal. I listened to it on Audible. It's about an hour and a half long, and it was just awesome. And it's nice because it's one of those books kind of like Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, where you can listen to it in an hour or so, and just kind of get that pick me up and then go ahead an charge and get stuff done. Love it.
The next one is The Go-Getter. And it's actually a story about somebody who is a Go Getter and what that means and what it means to really just go after things. And it's kind of an inspiring story. I'm pretty sure it's entirely fictional, but again it's that go out and get the things that you want and achieve the things that you want to achieve.
Finally the third book is the QBQ! The Question Behind the Question. And it's a book about personal responsibility. And anyway, all three of these are an hour and a half or less. So go check out those books. They are just terrific. I'll put links in the chat in the show notes.
Aaron, go ahead.
AARON:
All right, I'm going to pick from IBM, the blog tutorial on building a little MEAN app. And it's fairly comprehensive. It's a good chance to get into Mongo if you are an Angular developer, or with Node and Express. It's a great little tutorial. It's from IBM. It's from the blog, and you're just building a real-time polling app. It’s a simple little tutorial that will get you into those technologies. That’s my pick. I'll put the link in the show notes.
MATIAS:
Ok. So should I say picks as well?
CHUCK:
Yeah, go ahead.
MATIAS:
My pick is a blogging engine called Hugo, which is written in Go. And I've been tampering with that lately because I'm working on a new version of my blog. And that’s fairly cool. It's something to check out. If you are used to programming Jekyll which is a Ruby static site generator, have a look at that, or if you just really love WordPress and you wanna try something else, then take a look at both Jekyll and Hugo.
Otherwise, CloudFlare which is a hosting… they have proxy host for CDN, that’s really cool. If you are using CouldFront and you wanna have other features such as compression and speedy HTTP systems, take a look at that.
And finally, if you haven't done bungee jumping, you have to try that, because I tried that last week and it was fun.
CHUCK:
All right, Lukas, do you wanna give us your picks?
LUKAS:
Yeah, so one technical, one not. I just started a new project and we're doing ASP.NET MVC which is something that I normally haven’t done generally, strictly kind of a Mac stack kind of a guy, but I've been running windows in a VM and doing a lot of Visual Studio stuff, and I'm actually surprised at what a really solid IDE that is. And so, that’s just been really fun doing basically MVC and working Angular into it and kind of learning those conventions. So, something new, something interesting. I think it's a really good toolset.
And also I've been listening to Wool by Hugh Howey. And that’s a really awesome book that I've been enjoying. So I listen to a lot of books, but that one has been excellent.
CHUCK:
Awesome. John, what are your picks?
JOHN:
So I've got a couple of picks here. One of them is a little more code related. It's basically using Gulp with ng-annotate. I absolutely love Gulp. I've been preferring Gulp quite a bit lately. And ngannotate is just awesome for helping with the dependency injection notification and what not.
Second pick I've got is there's a really cool conference called Code on the Beach. It's a smaller conference but I kind of like the smaller ones; you get to mingle more with folks and it's really a lot of fun. Code on The Beach is cool because they do it actually in a hotel on the beach, and they actually reserve 4-5 hours from I think like 11 to 3pm on the day to do it on the weekend to do it. So you actually go off to the beach with everybody, and they have like a tiki bar and stuff and drinks. It's a very cool concept for a conference. And I'm actually going to it this weekend.
And then my final pick a group called Oh Honey, which is a shameless plug for my niece’s new band. It's actually hit the billboard charts. And she has a top hit in there. So I'm very proud of her.
AARON:
That’s awesome, man.
CHUCK:
Very cool.
AARON:
That conference is cool too, man.
JOHN:
Yeah.
AARON:
Can I do one follow up pick because I totally forgot to do this. Joe did it last week, but it hadn’t happened yet. I'm going to pick Guardians of The Galaxy. Saw it. Epic.
CHUCK:
It was so funny.
AARON:
Yeah, it was hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing. So go see Guardians of the Galaxy if you haven’t.
CHUCK:
If you are a child of the 80s, [chuckles] or even if you are not. My eight year old liked it too, so.
All right, let’s go ahead and wrap up the show. Thanks for coming, guys.
We'll be back next week!
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