Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk and Tech for Developers

Kal Ahmed and his open source team have created a great .NET-based NoSQL solution called BrightstarDB. Brightstar is an RDF triple store. What does that mean? It does not require the definition of a database schema, and with the RDF data model you can easily add and integrate data of all shapes. Kal talks to Scott about RDF, NoSQL, and the whens and whys of using a database like BrightStarDB.

Jessie Shternshus takes comedy and improve to the next level and applies it to Lean Startup and Agile Software methodologies. Can't believe it? Jessie sits down with Scott and they chat about how thinking quickly on your feet is a muscle and a skill that must be exercised.

Lara Swanson is the Engineering Manager of Performance at Etsy. She sits down with Scott to explain how to design for page load time, including optimizations to images, fonts, markup, and more. How important is having a culture of performance and executive buy-in? Is a two-second page load time reasonable? How important is A/B testing?

David Catuhe is the primary author of Babylon.js and an expert in WebGL. Are 3D games really happening on the web? There are more possibilities than you may realize! WebGL really lights up with libraries like three.js and babylon.js.

A collaborative group from Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital is working together to make automated blood glucose control a reality, and they have announced their results from the Bionic Pancreas study. Scott, who is also a 20 year+ Type 1 Diabetic on an insulin pump, sits down with Dr. Steven Jon Russell, MD, PhD to talk about this project and it's ramifications.

Scott continues to learn Azure and in this episodes turns to 3rd party expert Vishwas Lele. Vishwas builds Azure systems all day long and recently also released a Pluralsight course called "Applied Azure."

Scott talks to Lars Klint, a Windows Phone Developer MVP, about developing for Windows Phone 8.1. What's coming in 8.1 and what changes for developers? What's the plan for Universal Apps and what kind of reuse will we see?

Scott talks to Matt Barrett from Adaptive Consulting about creating high-quality reactive user interfaces for the industry. Adaptive has just released a reactive sample application as open source and it's a great place to start learning about Reactive Programming.

Jonathan Barronville is a Junior Developer, and he's not apologetic about it. What does it really mean to be Junior Developer, and why is everyone in such a rush to be a Senior? Are we really gaining experience or just experiencing the same years, one after another? What can we do as an industry to be more welcoming to Junior devs, while realizing that we must all be amateurs ourselves?

There's been a lot of talk around ASP.NET vNext. How did development start, and what's been the thinking about how to manage a new world while still innovating on the current generation of technology? In what ways does ASP.NET vNext break from the past, and in what ways does it build on our existing power and experience?

Scott is at the Cisco DevNet conference at Cisco Live! talking to Dr. Susie Wee. Susie is the CTO of Networked Experiences at Cisco. Susie shares some of her projects with Scott like the "Spring Roll" project, an immersive telepresence experiment for 'shoulder to shoulder' collaboration with remote teams.

Scott is at the Carnegie Mellon SATURN software architecture conference talking to Software Architect Dr. Len Bass. Len is a Senior Principal Researcher at NICTA in Australia and the author of Software Architecture in Practice. Len shares some of his stories over his 40+ year career in software.

Scott skypes with Computer Science student and game designer Lauren Scott. Lauren recently spoke at GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco. Are folks breaking out of the mold with indie games these days? How multi-faceted is video game design and what kinds of skills should one develop?

What happens when you apply agile practices to managing your family life? Is Scrum a good way to manage kids and their busy schedules? Agile expert David Starr from Scrum.org talks to Scott about implementing agile in his family.

Scott is in New Zealand talking to John-Daniel Trask from Mindscape. They've got a new cloud-based error tracking system called RayGun.io that Scott is using for two side startups. RayGun is rather unique in its wide "polyglot" language support. How does one build and maintain a service like RayGun?