A while ago I heard about some JavaScript Services that Steve Sanderson was working on for .NET core. The central idea was to provide services that could use NodeJS within an ASP.NET application, allowing us to consume all the awesome modules that are written for node. This can allow us to do a number of things, like prerendering and better integration between client and server that can run the same code.

Recently I ran into a new article about the work they are doing on JavaScript Services, and it seems to be far enough along now, that I think it is really worth trying out.
The documentation is really well written, so I won't write step by step instructions, but simply point out that it can be found on github and that it is pretty easy to get going.

What a year this has been, and now is the time for my yearly review. Work wise my business has been very simple to run and very stable, because I have continued to extend my contract with DI. This may sound boring initially, but the reason this has worked for me is that I get to dive into a lot of technologies especilly around Azure and Visual Studio Team Services. I have been building a greenfield self-service application, for one of the biggest and most influential organisations in the country, while having the hands on the wheel with reguard to tech and design. So although I have not been moving on to new projects as much as I expected I am loving it.

A subject that I find myself reading about and discussing over the dinner table a lot recently is the promise of self-driving cars. I absolutely love the idea because of all of the problems it can solve in society. No more drunk driving, no more wasting time in traffic jams, no more parking issues and no need to own an expensive heap of metal that looses value even though you only use it a few hours a week.

With this in mind I went to Sanna Pampels talk called “Automated driving - are we taking the human factors researcher out of the loop?”. The talk was relly good with Sanna starting out by covering the different levels of automation. Going from a level 0 with no automation, over different levels of assisted and partially automated driving to level 5 which is full automation or autonomous cars.

Sanna said that british drivers spend 124 hrs in traffic jams each year, and dribing is not as safe as it could be, mainly because of human errors in traffic.

Today I chose to take up an old advice and picked a track that was completely out of my comfort zone for the first day of GOTO. When jumping off the deep end you might as well do it completely, so I decided to go for a number of talks on Deep Learning Analytics.

I had high hopes because the first talk was an introduction to the subject called “what is it and what can it do for you”. Sadly the talk didn’t really do it for me, because it started out really theoretical, and Diogo Almeida seemed almost too passionate, which meant that he started speaking really fast and jumped between usecases, both current and some for the possible future.

This year is, believe it or not, the 20th anniversary of the GOTO conference. So I think the expectations are high, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center.

Dan North, who is a regular speaker at GOTO, was tasked with doing the first half of the keynote, and as always he delivered. The topic was on the future of agile, so a topic that I have seen Dan speak about a number of times. He went over how we are still a young industry with the vast majority of us being the first in our families to work in IT.

One of the things that makes GOTO special for me is that it is the one conference i visit every year where I run into developers with so many different backgrounds. Most conferences are in one way or another centered around one platform and one programming language. Even though GOTO started as a Java conference back when it was called Jaoo, this is no longer the case, with Microsoft being regulars on the speaker list, and with tracks on languages like Elixir, Pearl and NodeJS being a regular occurance in the past.

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So it's that time of the year again. GOTO Copenhagen is just around the corner, and this year it is the 20th anniversary, so I expect it to be an even bigger deal than it normally is. It certainly looks like it, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center on the 3.-4. October, and with a very impressive speaker lineup.

One of the nice features of functional programming languages like F# is the lack of null. Not having to check for null every where makes code a lot less errorprone. As the saying goes "What can C# do that F# cannot?" NullReferenceException". Tony Hoare who introduced null references in ALGOL even calls it his billion-dollar mistake. The thing is that although this is quite a known problem, it is not trivial to introduce non nullable types into an existing language, as Anders Hejlsberg talked about when I interviewed him at GOTO back in 2012.

With version 2.0 of TypeScript we do get non-nullable types, which has been implemented as a compiler switch --strictNullChecks. More...

One of the really nice things about Azure Webapps is the support for running Webjobs. Most large webapplications will at some point need some data or media processed by a background process, and for that Webjobs are a perfect fit.

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A few weeks ago Microsoft introduced the concept of "Cool" Blob Storage on Azure, which means that you get REALLY cheap storage for data that you don't access very often - backup being an obvious usecase. In my case I have used Dropbox for backups for a while, and although it works fine for a certain amount of data, it is not really a good fit for backing up that family photos and videos once a year from the home NAS.