We used to use Skobbler, which was great until they basically stopped working and went silent.
For the past 18 months, we've used Thunderforest (it's an OpenStreetMap PaaS) and they're great. Solid uptime, good maps and the pricing is amazingly good. Andy - the guy who runs it - is super helpful and can also put together custom map styles (which we've taken up).
You get to replace the over-engineered P&P crap that is WCF, Entity Framework and WebAPI with an extremely practical, elegant, fast and no-nonsense set of libraries focused on doing their specific job extremely well.
If you hate the current MS direction of having to reference a million DLLs into your project (i.e. ala NPM), then you will love ServiceStack's cleaner, less cluttered approach.
Felt like I was watching an episode of Silicon Valley, just needed the Hooli logo at the end. Think I threw up a little at some parts (am allergic to cheese), great comedy though, would recommend A++
Title is clickbait and inaccurate - they raised €550k at 100,000 users.
So they bootstrapped until 100k users (still a great achievement), but hardly to 4mil users as the title would suggest.
Even funnier: they forgot to mention all that sweet sweet EU and Austrian R&D funding money they received over the last couple of years for 'research projects' that don't deserve that title at all.
At least remove the Google part. Maybe just "How we grew to 4M users" since they didn't bootstrap. They got traction and raised money.
Also, their software is actually really helpful at thinking through ideas. I don't mean to knock them. But the title is wrong and takes away from their achievement.
Out of interest, how does Win 10 compare with Mac OSX in terms of being able to install and change default browser?
Given Apple's penchant for lock down, I'd expect it's much the same as Windows?
OSX has always worked as Windows 8.1 and below did with browsers - the browser pops up and asks if it can be the default and you say either "yes" or "leave me alone."
Windows 10 has made that a multi-step process, where the browser now bounces you to the control panel where you have to find the default browser section and make your choice.
Yeah aware of ElephantSQL but the concern is lack of SLA and lack of big company backing. If you guys disappear, what happens to my databases since they run on your subscription, not mine. Hence why having an IBM backed Postgres on Azure is attractive - even though big companies can be frivolous, there's a comfort in knowing they're less likely to go out of business.
+1, except would awesome to see this on Microsoft Azure. The current SQL database as a service offering on Azure is expensive with mediocre performance. A highly available Postgres as a Service offering backed by a big co like IBM would be most welcome on Azure.
"we’ll make .NET Core great for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. This also enables the Mono community to innovate on top of the leaner .NET Core stack as well as taking it to environments that Microsoft isn’t interested in."
Seems like a pretty clear split - MS will cover the server-side + Win UIs, while Xamarin handles the other plats (IOS, Android, PS4 etc).
This plays to the strengths of both companies, and I would not be surprised if MS has some security in place - e.g. some kind of first option to buy Xamarin should another suitor come calling.
