Tales of the CodeStorms

Microsoft recently released Azure Mobile Services, which allows your teams to quickly create a data store and a few operations (insert, update, delete, read) to quickly start pushing/pulling data from your mobile clients (iOS, Android, Windows). I call this "back-end as a service" or "BaaS". Furthermore, It is becoming a hot topic for the past few months as Parse is currently tackling the same problem space. It turns out, there are many more companies in the same arena. Also, to point out, the Microsoft team actually built that with NodeJS / SQL Server.

The value in BaaS is in its ability to provide mobile hackers a quick way to prototype (create an MVP) without having to think about the back-end architecture. This is quite powerful because thinking about architecture might put you down a path that slows down your team's momentum. It is definitely needed -- but not for creating an MVP and putting it infront of real customers and then taking in feedback.
Mobile …

Software engineering is hard. We all know from a technical perspective, we hit our heads against the desks trying to figure out solutions to problems that have the most constrained environments and it's up to our ingeniousness to think outside the box and solve it. This is why I love software. In today's blogpost,  I won't be talking about the technical aspect of software engineering but the human side: team building.

The next generation software engineering companies that create the most interactive, engaged, and fun environments will be built on top of 3 core concepts: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is a widely used phrase and it's evangelized by Dan Pink. In his book, "Drive", it dives into the problems of current working environments for software teams but then it goes into a few studies and examples of how to evolve the working environments to create teams that know how to hustle, have fun, and drive value to their customers.

Valve, Github, Atlassi…

After serving the RESAAS vision and its team of high performance salespeople, visionaries, and software engineers for the past year -- I've made the decision to take on a different challenge that involves helping DevOps be more open and connected to their tools, teams, and solutions using social and big data as vehicles to achieve our grand vision. It's official -- I have left RESAAS and I'm determined to make things easier for DevOps as it continues to grow as an integral role in software engineering teams.

By reading Software Will Eat The World -- one can agree that software has the ability to disrupt a wide array of industries and markets. The great thing about this is with cloud computing, costs to ship an MVP have been reduced drastically. Furthermore, having production systems serving millions of customers have caused the "DevOps" role to emerge in Internet-based software companies.
DevOps can be defined as a hybrid of operations, quality assurance, as wel…

If you're ever wondering what we use for tools at RESAAS, I've taken the time to write about the different tools we use for specific parts of our engineering initiatives. This includes automation, project management, and feature development across different operating systems and platforms.

Feature Development on Web
Visual Studio 2010 Professional - This can be downloaded through MSDN. Additionally, since our whole platform is built on Windows Azure, we use the Azure .NET SDK to integrate with many of Microsoft's cloud services, such as, Blob, Tables, Queues, Service Bus, SQL Azure, and Traffic Manager.

Sublime Text 2 - A free text editor that has interoperable plugins with Text Mate. It also works flawlessly across Windows and Mac OS X.

SASS (Compass) - A easy-to-use language on top of CSS which gives developers the ability to create reusable mixins, css variables, as well as, auto concatenation and minification.

Mojo - A JavaScript microframework that lets developers levera…