Posted on by Jon

Herding Code 162: Whacha doin, Goodbye Google Reader, scriptcs and Lightning Round!

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk about what they’ve been up to lately (including Kevin’s new Greater Than Parts site), lament the passing of Google Reader, talk about scriptcs, and even fit in a lightning round!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 162: Whacha doin, Goodbye Google Reader, scriptcs and Lightning Round! [audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0162-Discussion.mp3]

Show Notes:

  • What are you up to?
    • (00:29) Scott K is doing MVC with a lot of JavaScript.
      • He laments the quality of the code he’s working with.
      • There’s a discussion of how bad code happens and how to clean it up.
    • (07:58) Kevin’s been working on his GreaterThanParts site.
      • He soft launched it on twitter and got more response than he expected, but it’s been holding up.
      • It’s a full JavaScript stack – Node, Backbone, Mongo.
      • Kevin was surprised how resistant developers were to trying out the site via Google / Facebook login, so he set up an anonymous (cookie based) login.
      • Scott K has some specific feature requests.
      • Jon asks if the design feedback was coherent or contradictory. Kevin says some was really good, a lot wasn’t
    • (15:40) Jon talks about the ASP.NET Jump Start event he did in February and some upcoming Web Camp he’s doing – Denmark, Istanbul, Sunnyvale, San Diego. In his spare time he’s working on a book about programming Windows 8.
      • Scott K mentions a blog post he read about a developer who was frustrated he couldn’t store password protected zip files or preview office docs. Jon says it’s an app model and it’s different than building desktop apps. Kevin wonders about how the updates will work for Windows Store apps.
      • Scott K says he read about limitations in displaying help files. Jon says that some things are easier to do using the HTML dev model, and he’s seeing some people writing business logic in C# and using it in an HTML app.
      • K Scott talks about the current campaign to pay developers for apps. Jon says he thinks that may be driven by the fact that all the tech columnists just write about the number of apps in the store, but he agrees that fewer quality apps is better. The Windows Store has a try / buy model, which effectively halves the number of apps required compared to Android and iOS. Jon talks about how he’s been using the Surface RT.
    • (25:49) Google Reader
      • K Scott asks if anyone’s upset. Kevin is.
      • Scott K hasn’t used it in a while because he just uses Twitter and an RSS reader he likes.
      • Jon says he used to read tons of feed, but he now gets most of his info off Twitter, Hacker News, and TheCadmus.com
      • Scott K says he’s going to need to replace Reader because he follows some feeds he cares about that will never make their way onto Hacker News.
      • Jon says he used to use Reader more when it had Google Gears support. He talks about how he tried to write his own RSS reader which never materialized, but he learned a lot along the way.
      • Kevin says the bigger problem is that so many apps use Google Reader as an RSS sync backend.
      • Jon says he’s happy that the whole RSS system isn’t dependent on Google Reader, and that it’s a good thing that major parts of the web stayed open.
    • (34:45) scriptcs
      • K Scott overviews the idea.
      • Scott K says he thinks it’s interesting – a natural use of Roslyn. He’s been wanting something that would output assemblies so it could create projects.
      • Jon talks about some of the samples they’ve got, including WPF, Mono, etc. He says he’d prefer it to PowerShell since it could be more portable and the syntax is better.
      • Kevin says many of these ideas came from the Node community. He’s really enjoying the low overhead of working in vim. Scott agrees. Jon says he doesn’t see Visual Studio delays, maybe because he’s not using heavy add-ins. A border skirmish erupts. Kevin says that he thinks that .NET programming kind of requires Visual Studio. Jon like the new web tools stuff.
    • (44:27) Lightning Round!
      • K Scott asks if anyone cares about the S4 release. Nobody does. We’re all kind of tired of smartphone releases.
      • K Scott asks what we’d recommend for teaching someone to program. Scott K, Kevin, and Jon all agree that they’d start with the web and JavaScript and talk about some of their favorite tools.
      • K Scott asks what everyone thinks about the new Rearden.js library with the Rearden Metal templating system.

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