Interviewed by Jonathan Rozenblit for "Canada Does Windows Azure"

Jonathan Rozenblit who is a Developer Advisor at Microsoft interviewed me for a series he does called "Canada does Windows Azure". We spent 17 min talking about how RESAAS uses Azure, why it decided to use Azure and how our developers ramped up on the platform when we first started.

Here are links to the blog posts Jonathan put on his blogs:

• http://aka.ms/cdnazure-resaas
• http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/canadadoesazure/resaas

Towards Instant Programming Feedback

This hour long conference lecture by Bret Victor is a really fascinating look at how to change the way engineering professionals create what they create. He experiments with some simple yet powerful tools to show what creative tasks could look like if they provided almost instant feedback to their creator. Most of the examples relate to software engineering and the languages used are either in JavaScript or Java.

Update (6/7/2014):

I recently came across Light Table which is a next generation IDE which displays code right next to a browser window. You can then modify the code and it is updated within the browser in real-time.

Microsoft's Case Study on how RESAAS leverages Windows Azure

Microsoft recently put together a case study on how RESAAS has used Windows Azure to scale its platform to meet future demand. As mentioned previously in the slides on this post, it took us approximately 3 months to port over our entire application from a typical IIS web server and SQL Server database based application to a cloud based one.

How did Instagram Scale their Infrastructure?

TechCrunch has a great post written up just after Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 Billion. The post contains a 185 slide deck filled with the trials and tribulations Instagram went through on their way to 30+ million users in less than 2 years.

Appointed as VP of Engineering at RESAAS

I am thrilled to accept my new positon as the VP of Engineering at RESAAS. I joined the company 8 months ago as the first full-time software engineer and with the help of Tom Rossiter, CTO, we have grown the development team to 8 full-time backend, frontend and quality assurance engineers all in 6 short months. Our team has been able to successfully expand in such a short time-frame by utilizing Agile methodologies, test automation, continuous integration and database change management tools along with the dedication of some amazingly talented engineers who work very hard to continuously improve the processes, the tooling and most importantly the product RESAAS is offering.

The enterprise social network that our team is building has evolved considerably over that time period from a single .NET and SQL Server based system hosted in a data center to a scalable platform hosted in the cloud (Windows Azure). Our core platform has been able to leverage Worker roles, Web roles, SQL Azure and Azure Table and Blob Storage along with various other 3rd party services to connect real estate professionals and their clients together in real-time via their laptop or chosen mobile device.

I am looking forward to working hard and developing the full potential of both our engineering team and the RESAAS core platform in the coming months.

Note that RESAAS is a public company currently listed on the CNSX under the symbol: RSS. Here is the press release on the CNSX of my appointment as Vice President of Engineering at RESAAS.