SE Podcast #11 – Rory Blyth

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Rory Blyth (with no 'e' as he is very insistent) fresh off his move to a new house in Portland, OR.  This week's topics include:

• Rory has had a whirlwind of moving and relocating as of late.  Today is the first day he got more than 3 hours of sleep, but he is now happily in his new house. Rory hasn't been writing as much as of lately because of random personal and relationship issues - but he's free now! Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

• Jeff recommends "Enemy of the State" (even though it stars Will Smith) - it's a spiritual sequel to The Conversation and it also contains a faraday cage, in case you're interested in seeing one of those.

• While working on .Net Rocks! (our podcast competition - so don't visit that link) Rory moved for a while to New London, CT - and it only took one day to decide to move there.

• Rory was also part of podcasting way back in the early days (of 2004) while everything was still being decided about formats, styles, enclosures, etc. He was also a featured guest on Podcast #71 of the Stack Overflow podcast in 2009!

• Jeff wants to know what Rory has been up to for the past couple years: and apparently Rory is still very focused on iPhone development. One of the biggest changes: all the clever hacks that programmers did originally are now supported by real APIs which makes it less fun for the nerds.

• MonoTouch was recently spun out by Novell after its "restructuring" and is now tied in to Xamarin. Rory loves MonoTouch because of the ease of it and the incredible power that it gives developers, including cocoa bindings, the ability to drop in .NET binaries, efficiencies, etc

• You can also find Rory's new site at Rory.me (once he actually starts blogging there)

• One valid reason to use Objective C over MonoTouch is that it is a much smaller file,  Although it has gotten much more efficient recently, according to Rory.

• Rory argues that fascism is good in tech products: from the iPhone to Xbox, by isolating and controlling everything in the platform it allows the company to control the experience and ensure quality.  Otherwise you can end up with things like Windows Mobile / Windows CE.

• Google runs the risk of running into similar issues with Android.  The other question is if they are diversifying out too much (into crazy projects like wind power).

• How do we keep Stack Exchange questions up to date? The Monotouch vs Objective C question above is 2 years old now and may no longer be fully accurate; we accept edits from anonymous and 1 reputation users now, but how can we motivate them to improve this old question?

• Rory is also one of the most "prolific" answerers on our site with the highest vote to answer ratio on the site!

• Rory will also be speaking at Stack Overflow DevDays - so pick up your tickets now if you want to see him (with discount code 'podcast' for $100 off)

• Help us test the new Stack Exchange mobile view on your mobile device by enabling it on meta! (scroll down to the very bottom of the page to enable it there.)

There's no podcast next week (the 12th) but we'll be back live @ 4pm on the 19th so see you then!

Episode source