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Youi Insurance, Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Want to work for a dynamic, fast growing insurance company which writes all its own software? Like the idea of living on the Sunshine Coast (average winter temperature 21 degrees), and working in an office a minute from the beach? Do you want to write software using C#, F#, AngularJS, Xamarin and Raven DB?

Youi is looking for experienced .Net developers preferably with strong web skills or Xamarin focused mobile skills. If you’re interested in working somewhere with an awesome technology vision, an emphasis on work/life balance and a fun work environment as part of a fast growing, profitable business get in touch with [email protected].


If you're willing to live in sunny SE QLD, Australia, and good at C# as well as JS, get in touch.


Thanks for the invite, it is a bit far from Germany and Portugal. :)


I actually thought maybe this was a joke. This seems like a pretty brittle and hard to maintain way to go about this.

Surely a better solution is something more declarative which is then wrapped up in a library of some sort that does the heavy lifting.

An example of declarative validation is in ASP.Net MVC 3 and above where you can define validation on the server side models, enable unobstrusive javascript and you get both server and client side validation where the client side work is done by jquery and the server side by the model binding infrastructure that turns http request data into controller inputs.


Would you be able to elaborate on how it slows initial development way down (and is a pain to debug!)?

I've only played with it a little but the deployment story seemed quite nice.


So, in summary, yes, yes it does :)


How is this vastly different to Azure Tables?


The cost per transaction, performance & ease.

Reads per $0.01 = (50.60).60 = 180000

Writes per $0.01 = (10.60).60 = 36000

Assuming that you hit your usage is at 100% capacity then from a read prospective DynamoDB is half the price. Writes are much more expensive but many applications are heavily read oriented.

DynamoDB claims single digit millisecond reads, azure tables does not (from my experience.)

Azure tables have a maximum performance over a given partition table of 500 requests per second and over the whole account of 5,000 requests per second. DynamoDB does not state this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/...

To put this into context:

Assume a system with 5000 writes per second and 50000 reads here are the costs:

AWS Reads: $240 AWS Writes: $120 Aws Total: $360

Azure Reads: $4320 Azure Writes: $432 Azure Total: $4752

Seems like quite a difference for a decent sized read heavy application.


Can you please explain your math? AFAIK Azure txns are not paid by the hour - they are a flat cost of $.01 per 10000 storage txns. If you do batched GETs and PUTs you make only 550 txns (55000/100 entites/batch).

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/tour/storage/

I agree that Dynamo's provisioned throughput capacity is a very useful feature though. Azure does not provide any such performance guarantee; the throughput limit is also a guideline as far as i know, not an absolute barrier.


I should have explained that my costs were calculated on a "per day" assumption. Thus the costs are for:

5000 x 60 x 60 x 24 = 432000000 Writes

50000 x 60 x 60 x 24 = 4320000000 Reads

(432000000/10000) x 0.01 = $432

(4320000000/10000) x 0.01 = $4320

Azure Total Cost For One Days Use: $4752

((5000/10) x 0.01) x 24 = $120

((50000/50) x 0.01) x 24 = $240

AWS Total Cost For One Days Use: $360

You are right that I don't take into account the bulk feature of azure reads & writes but this is down to bulk requests only being possible on a single partition at a time which in my personal experience (not exhaustive) is non-trivial to take advantage of.


Your math is right, except you missed a factor for Dynamo - Unit size.

http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/#pricing

If your txns are all within 1KB, your math holds good; otherwise, you pay more. Interesting model, but I suspect it'll average out to similar costs.


The cost difference between Windows Azure Tables and DynamoDB really depends upon the size of the entities being operated over and the amount of data stored. If an application can benefit from batch transactions or query operations, the savings can be a lot per entity using Windows Azure Tables.

For the cost of storage. The base price for Windows Azure Tables is $0.14/GB/month, and the base price for DynamoDB is $1.00/GB/month.

For transactions, there is the following tradeoff

• DynamoDB is cheaper if the application performs operations mainly on small items (couple KBs in size), and the application can’t benefit from batch or query operations that Windows Azure Tables provide

• Windows Azure Tables is cheaper for larger sized entities, when batch transactions are used, or when range queries are used

The following shows the cost of writing or reading 1 million entities per hour (277.78 per second) for different sized entities (1KB vs 64KB). It also includes the cost difference between strong and eventually consistent reads for DynamoDB. Note, Windows Azure Tables allows batch operations and queries for many entities at once, at a discounted price. The cost shown below is the cost per hour for writing or reading 1,000,000 entities per hour (277.78 per second).

• 1KB single entity writes -- Azure=$1 and DynamoDB=$0.28

• 64KB single entity writes -- Azure=$1 and DynamoDB=$17.78

• 1KB batch writes (with batch size of 100 entities) -- Azure=$0.01 and DynamoDB=$0.28

• 64KB batch writes (with batch size of 100 entities) -- Azure=$0.01 and DynamoDB=$17.78

• 1KB strong consistency reads -- Azure=$1 and DynamoDB=$0.05

• 64KB strong consistency reads -- Azure=$1 and DynamoDB=$3.54

• 1KB strong consistency reads via query/scan (assuming 50 entities returned on each request) – Azure=$0.02, DynamoDB=$0.05

• 64KB strong consistency reads via query/scan (assuming 50 entities returned on each request) – Azure=$0.02, DynamoDB=$3.54

• 1KB eventual consistency reads – DynamoDB=$0.028

• 64KB eventual consistency reads – DynamoDB=$1.77


We kind of took the other route, our daughter slept whenever there was time really. We took her backpacking across Europe for 2 months when she was 8 months old, she just slept whenever she was tired. At home she would go to bed if we were at home, but we didn't hesitate to go out for dinner or to a friends house or whatever and she'd just sleep whereever we ended up. In contrast some of our friends have kids who will only sleep if they're in their usual environment which can make things a bit tricky. We're expecting number 2 in 10 weeks, so hopefully the next one is equally easy going.


I find kids adopt to their parents way of doing things. My wife and I are rather calm, and so are our children. They fall asleep easily enough, are happy children, and calm and relaxed.

The problem some parents have with their children is they try to change the way the children behave to something other than what they learned from their parents.

If they are the type to go out, party, invite friends over and stay up late, etc, then they should expect their children to emulate that. It's when the parents want their children to behave differently that you have a problem. This is all purely my own experience.


This sounds a lot like our philosophy on sleep.

My sister gets in a panic if the kids aren't in the bath at a particular time, aren't in bed on routine haven't finished a meal at the set time, etc.. PITA I say.

We've had problems now that J has gone to school. We couldn't keep the same sleep regime as we had to be up to get to school.


How is Australia not an island? It's way bigger than Greenland.


For those who are interested in size comparisons, here's an interesting projection of the globe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_map_unfolded.png


An interactive version:

http://teczno.com/faumaxion-II/


perhaps because it has it's own tectonic plate and thus is no longer just an island?


Using this logic, Eurasia could be considered an island as well. You have to draw the line somewhere. They're all empiric definitions anyway.


In the english speaking world we refer to Australia as a continent, but I just saw a kid's encyclopedia from France which refers to Australia as an island.

There oughtta be 7 continents; without Aust there'd only be 6 :(


In Germany Australia technically belongs to Oceania which includes Australia, New Zealand and all those tiny islands. Could be the same in France.


It's really no big deal, but in Australia as kids we're taught we live on a continent that is an island and a country :)


I'd probably come too if the date worked


Tough crowd :O I thought it was a really interesting insight into the 'softer' side of starting up, the stress and personal investment of a founder in his company. I know how stressful live demos are even to a fairly sympathetic audience who are going to give you another chance if things go horribly wrong; I could really identify with his description of it knowing how much was riding on it going well.

Good luck to him.


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