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. 

My Social Graph: Linkedin Professional Network

I recently tried out Linkedin Lab's InMaps product which visualizes your professional social graph (see image below). Apart from it creating a great visualization of my own professional data, I found it quite interesting how it seems to capture pivotal sets of relationships that have shaped my professional life and essentially weights them according to their inter-connectedness.

The largest mass of blue connections on the right are a result of a former company I worked for called Blast Radius. They are a digital agency so I was exposed to many short-term or contract employees throughout all the projects I worked on. Blast Radius is a global company so the clump of green connections in the top right are mostly the European based employees and contractors that I worked with.

Smaller clumps of connections on the bottom and bottom-left are due to the startup company I currently work for, RESAAS, classmates during my university days and various people I met while working for Toshiba Medical in the United Kingdom. Finally the smallest clumps scattered around are due to friends, family and football team members whom I have connected with over the years.

So what value can be extracted from this InMaps visualization?

1. Information that I create or update on Linkedin clearly has a bias towards being seen and/or acted upon by current and former Blast Radius employees in Canada, the United States and across Europe. Therefore when I post something or update my profile I can take this into account as I now have a better understanding of who my audience actually is.
2. I have heard it said before that you never have more access to connect with people than when you are in university. That may still be true but given that Linkedin was in its infancy around the time I was in university and the fact that I have taken the opportunity to connect with many people in each professional setting I have worked in, my current professional social graph indicates that my current university connections take on an increasingly smaller part of my overall ability to connect with people worldwide.
3. The visualization says nothing about the individual importance of each connection or group of connections that make up my professional social graph. However, by using my own judgement about the people I am closest too and/or have the ability to influence the most, I can roughly identify how to spend my time wisely to either obtain the information I'm looking for or to maximise the reach of information that I would like people to know or act upon.

Link to My Linkedin Labs InMaps