Last year was our best year ever. We now have a good micro-brand and are growing fast.
Our work management SaaS user base grew 166% during the year. Customers remain satisfied with us and on average stick with us for over a decade.
We love our customers and want to grow with them. Our employees are talented, dedicated and innovative. Future looks very bright for us.
Once again Joel is fun and engaging in his communications. His blog was an inspiration to me for well over a decade and this book continues on the same vein.
Joel is clearly stating that you should only hire the best technical talent. In this book Joel describes why this is the only sane approach. He talks about identifying the best and doing whatever necessary to hire them. One can disagree with some of his methods, but I do fully agree with his main argument.
The book includes the famous Joel Test. If you work with software I do strongly recommend you to take the Joel Test. Best companies have score of 12. Ten years ago our company Nepton had a score of 3. Currently Nepton has a score of 10. Still ways to go but we have definitely improved a bit 🙂
Microsoft 
TechEd 2014 in Barcelona – Good weather, nice city and interesting tech sessions 🙂
CLOUD
Everyone is investing massively in their cloud platforms. Amazon is still the market leader, but Microsoft Azure is growing fast. Ultimately there will only be few big cloud vendors – likely Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Azure is soon crossing 1M servers milestone which is quite mindboggling number. For the Titanfall game launch day they used 25K servers. New Azure G-series virtual machine instances are quite nice with 30 cores, 448 GB of memory and 6 TB of SSD. All vendors are investing on fast SAN/NAS/EBS storage technologies and one can now get up to 60 K IOPS from standard cloud architecture.
CLOUD HW
Azure Pack allows you to install Azure on your data-center. This allows hybrid scenarios and configurations. Based on sessions I saw it’s quite clear that Microsoft will integrate all possible server products they have closely with Azure. There is a new (quite expensive) offering “Dell Cloud Platform System” which is basically an Azure appliance on top of Dell hardware. There are specialty PCI SSD configurations & appliances allowing you to have 700 K IOPS with very low latencies in micro-second range. One server was bench-marked as 1+ M SQL transactions per second.
DOCKER
This was new technology to me. Pioneered by Google, Linux and Docker. Now coming to Windows. Virtualized “bubbles” or “containers” running on top of one OS without hypervisors. Allows very lightweight virtual containers to be isolated while sharing resources. Bootup times of few seconds compared to several minutes for full VM images. Sizes are also much lower as no need to store full guest OS images. Massive cost savings possible on cloud scale architecture.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Regular-IT-Guy/Docker-High-Level-Whiteboard
DEVOPS
Azure has automation APIs to set up and configure your environment. Powershell is very powerful indeed! New technology “Desired State Configuration” allows one to describe the runtime requirements for the server platform and it automatically applies and maintains all relevant software versions.
SIMD
New upcoming Intel CPUs have much improved SIMD support. Upcoming NET JIT supports these and allows one to write SIMD enabled code directly on .NET languages. See RyuJIT CTP3 for more details.
.NET FUTURE
Roslyn compiler framework coming to all aspects of NET framework. Native compilation targeting specific CPU architectures, now for store apps and later likely everything, 20% performance improvement or so. Ultimately allows us to stop execution, debug, change any code and continue execution. Enables very high level of customization and extensibility of the Visual Studio IDE – practically the language itself is soon programmable.
XAMARIN
This was very impressive. Develop logic core with C#, UI core with C# and small Windows/WinPhone/Android/iOS UI adapters all written 100% with C#. Runs natively on all target platforms with native look and feel for each. Very good tools and emulators for Android etc. No need to learn Objective C or any of that stuff.
ASYNC
Use Tasks for CPU bound work and Async for IO bound work. Async is NOT parallel programming, but allows much better utilization of threadpool if you are working with IO resources. This is quite difficult subject but might be worthwhile to learn.
SECURITY
Participated on live demos about security. Quite horrible to see how small mistakes in application level coding can leave you 110% open to total security breaches.
Solution is simple:
1) Employ good developers
2) Patch servers
3) Give minimum possible access rights everywhere
4) IMPORTANT: Use firewalls to disable outgoing connections from servers as much as possible so hacked beach-heads are unable to phone home
VISUAL STUDIO TIPS &TRICKS (availability depends on version you have)
Good tips and guidance in this book. Those starting out in the industry will not gain maximum benefits from this, nor will the experienced pros. Best fit for a programmer with few years under his/her belt.
Years ago I avidly read many good blog posts written by Marc Andreessen. Bit later Marc restarted his blog to exclusively follow his VC firm a16z. All his earlier writings were lost.
Today I stumbled upon an archive of his earlier writings. Many of these are still excellent posts and I highly recommend them. In case the archive later would go down I also made a ZIP backup just in case.
I made this post just to make sure that Marc’s writings can be found as they are so useful to entrepreneurs everywhere. If Marc wants me to remove links to his old writings I would reluctantly do so – hopefully this will not happen! 🙂
Heartbleed was a truly epic security defect. Full impact of this is still unclear, but countless number of servers, applications and devices were vulnerable. Repercussions are still ongoing through the entire IT community. Impact on certificate providers has been massive.
I was however amazed by Heartbleed for quite another reason. Finnish company Codenomicon actually *branded* this defect. They crafted the story, name, domain and logo for it. They did such a good job that journalists just ran with the story and spread the message to the global audience. Buying this kind of publicity would have cost tens of millions for the company, but they got it almost free by being in the right place at the right time and taking the clever action. I’m amazed and humbled by this. Salutations to those in Codenomicon who made this happen 🙂
Naval is at it again. His vision of bitcoin is comprehensive and compelling. In his mind he sees bitcoin and its myriad of descendants powering large sectors of our financial infrastructure. He sees a true revolutionary technology in the making, our multipass towards financial freedom and innovation. A true fifth protocol. But is he right?
I believe his vision points us towards right direction, but is not entirely correct. One major problem I see with cryptocurrencies is the creation of money by mining. This is straightforward in its’ way and for some purposes serves perfectly fine. But this does not map so well to the money creation people (or machines) might truly prefer. I see this mostly as an ethics and fairness problem. If compelling alternative with different money creation mechanism appears I believe many will choose that option instead (or alongside) cryptocurrencies
Platforms like classic Ripple tried to approach this problem from different perspective. They failed for good reasons and everyone moved their focus to blockchain. I still believe there is a third option. And on this belief I founded my startup Centibel 🙂
As mentioned before I quite like the platform thinking of Sangeet Paul Choudary. His approach is fresh and systematic. If you are interested on this area you should definitely take a look on his writings.
Bitcoin is interesting and even revolutionary in many ways. Bitcoin as money is only one aspect of the wider Bitcoin platform. Marc and Naval explain this quite well. I have taken a look into technology innovations behind Bitcoin and they are quite amazing indeed.
My vision for Centibel differs quite drastically from Bitcoin. As everyone and their grandmother is only looking at Bitcoin, Centibel is preparing to sail out to the wide blue uncharted ocean.
There is a huge backlog of books and blogs I’m planning to read. Mobile First has been on my to-be-read list for quite a while now, but in my recent flight to CES 2014 I finally read it through.
This is good book. I knew some of this stuff already, but found the book to be an entertaining and informative read. If you are interested on this area I would recommend this book.