Cloud Sourced - Episode #87 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:00 Justin Edelstein: So, how do you think we're going to get there? The next thing you're going to do is

Jason Atwood: Look at the of cockwheaty.com experts, and the Permissioner! Permission, that's done easy. It's beautiful. Good thing we're inside in the studio. In the studio, the closed, windless, airless studio. Don't even know what it is. It I About how to publish an app on the AppExchange., can you talk a little bit about that? We'll talk about the Kickstarter project that has and has gone absolutely insane. Sort of cloud sourcing if you will. There's that title. We had some Salesforce Degregation this week. that we have to do. And then we can do that.

Justin Edelstein: How does it happen? How does this timeliness happen?

Jason Atwood: It's probably an agenda posted for everybody to do the blog-'s post. So this week, it is a blog post to something that I don't think everybody would do, but it's sort of something that, you know, it's nice to know how to do, which is, I don't think Listing. So we, you know, this is our second app we launched. We launched You know, it's not an easy process.

Justin Edelstein: That I know when I can start.

03:02 Jason Atwood: Okay, you can start at any time. Just jump right in.

Justin Edelstein: That's on blog.arkusinc.com. prospective blog. the comments on it? It's very palatable. So it's not intimidating in any way. But it does give you a good idea of the steps and, the processes involved with getting something from from the app exchange where it's then available to hundreds of thousands of Salesforce orgs and millions of customers. I think there's over a thousand apps now in the app exchange. 10,000. Really, I don't think so.

Jason Atwood: A thousand? Yeah, I do. I think it's 10,000. I don't think so.

Justin Edelstein: I'm gonna check check on that. Let's see, if we do like a, is there like a view all?

Jason Atwood: Oh, it says, well up there it says over a million installs. Installs.

Justin Edelstein: That doesn't give us a number of apps. That's a good question. How many apps, apps are there in the app exchange?

Jason Atwood: But anyway, so the one thing that I learned during this process, having a They make you go through a security review, which they It could be, it's not just that it could take four to five. Weeks to get it through, but it also could be, you go in once, they say no, you have to go change code, you come back, so if you're looking to launch something I don't know,, I don. It's a big event, maybe like Dreamforce event. And if you haven't checked out the out. go do so. The permission and compliance for Chatter which are both live. That's the sponsoring-ness of this podcast. So let's talk about a little bit. So this is an interesting, I don't think we've talked a lot about Kickstarter, but since it's breaking news this week, I thought we should talk about it.

Jason Atwood: I saw this. a Kickstarter fan as you know I've bought now? I do know. I've bought more than a few. In fact I think no this one isn't but I I've bought many things on Kickstarter. I love the concept. Let me tell you a Kickstarter. So Kickstarter it's for people. trying to raise money. Bye. level. So then, so what you do is you post it all, you then post a bunch of at the $100 level you get X and if the $200 and the $500 and $ $3000 level will come to a house and make you dinner. So they post what you'll get in it and then you pay through Amazon Marketplace which is really smart, like just make it easy. So I found out about, I think the first one I bought was PadPivot.

06:58 Jason Atwood: It was an iPad sort of a holder that kind of folded up and could do a lot of things and I actually use refuses all the It and they basically. It's not funded didn't make the they make the minimum so I've done I think the 5 the videos are usually fun they're kind of like homemade so that's kickstarter there's one that came up last week was just called pebble the e-paper watch for iPhone and Android and it is a an electronic when it was just, about, at a million bucks of funding, or maybe $800,000 of funding, JPMI went, it went for the one where you get one of the watches. And then it went crazy. It hit in gadget and over. Over a week and a half period, it's now up to, it's the highest funded Kickstarter project ever, over five million dollars.

Jason Atwood: People, their goal was, can you scroll up to see their goal. The goal was to raise $100,000. Where do Kickstarter has even gone... it's been amazing. It's been a huge phenomenon. Again, people do movies, they do video games, shows. It doesn't have to be something technology. The technology ones go through the roof. Yes, it's a geeky thing. As geeks go in there and bump it up. My friend did a and Kickstarter.

Justin Edelstein: He started a project. It didn't get fully funded. It was an iPad. Case holder like made of like wood. It was interesting. It was an interesting concept I backed him because he was my friend, but then I got my money back Yeah, so it didn't get funded An album that got funded and I pledged the amount where I get I get to download the album and I get a Limited edition seven inch vinyl of two songs that aren't going to be on the album. Oh that's cool. So that was like a little incentive to give a little more.

10:06 Jason Atwood: Definitely if you want to, if you, I mean everybody should check out Kickstarter, it's just fun to watch the sort of process. And it's a ways for people who can't, you know, go, you aren't Apple, Google, whatever, don't have millions of dollars to go raise money. You can raise it through people. It's very, very successful. If you haven't just gone to those kickstarter.com, spelled the way it sounds, you should at least go poke around, because it is some fun stuff. And back a few if you want to. Again, I'm almost addicted to it. And certainly if you really want to get, if you're a kickstarter project... Get your stuff on Engadget, because that was the launching point.

Justin Edelstein: That seems like the key, right? Have Engadget just pick you up, because then you have millions of people reading that every day. But interesting, the way that the internet now can crowdsource, which is impressive.

Jason Atwood: Now I know what the new legislation has put in from... that was signed into law, I think... two weeks ago, which is actually this this well when this thing comes do I get to use it as my take a week when it comes? Sure. Alright great. I want to hear all about it. It'll because I will not have one. It'll be in December no September or something. You got a ways to go. I got a ways to go. Next up, in some not so great news, head on over to trust. Salesforce.com and look at the... It's not a pretty picture,

Justin Edelstein: Picture yeah for NA3 users. We're not on an A3. I have not heard this from any of our customers, which is kind of, surprising because I have to imagine at least one of them is on an A3, but I haven't heard anything. Explain what's going on. So right now, if you go to salesforce.com, which is Salesforce's real time, I guess, incident, and uptime reporting. mechanism you'll see that there's a info icon for what you really want is the green checkbox but there's an info icon for NA3 pod NA3 for the whole week and it looks like it goes back even further because I was looking at this earlier in the week it goes back all the way to April 11th which is nine days ago there's a search issue. So search performance has been, I guess there's been a degradation of search performance on NA3.

Justin Edelstein: So much so that, which I think was caused by some manual error, some issue with a person doing something... incorrectly, that they have to actually re-index the data for every org in NA3. Wow, which is why there's still the degradation still on. So they're re-indexing the full instance over the next few weeks. That activity will have no performance impact on search during its execution, but I imagine they're going to continue to keep this reported. I'm looking at the root cause now. The problem was created by an operator error while performing a routine hardware upgrade. So, a erroneous command was executed, and the search tier began to exhibit incomplete search results.

13:36 Jason Atwood: No fun. Yeah, incomplete search, but that's sort of the thing about search is you don't know that it's not working You really don't because you expect it to work and when the data is not there you just think it's

Justin Edelstein: Not there You basically are like hmm interesting Let me I know John Smith exists like people like me who navigate with search would notice that I'd be like, no, I know this person exists. I get there by looking for him. of He's not there.

Jason Atwood: What's going on? Yeah, I just did some training for some clients this morning. And I always start. Start and almost end with search.

Justin Edelstein: And I too always start with search. Just say start with search. Because it's like at the very top, it's like, that's the thing. That's your Google. You go there and you look for things.

Jason Atwood: Don't enter things. until you look for it first. I will say a nice feature additive, which maybe I'll go add to the Idea Exchange today. I had one the other day, but would be new button, create new on a search results. Yeah, I want that. Because.

Justin Edelstein: I wanna create new things everywhere. Well, when you're,

Jason Atwood: You'd like to search. But then you want to create that thing new right from okay. I see it's not here Let me go create a new one and you can't do that I think we need to do an all ideas exchange show show where we go through is like your is this is right up there with Your March Madness idea that went down the tubes that you didn't execute on

Justin Edelstein: And now we got all search We're gonna do an all idea exchange because we have we keep a list of all the ideas that we as Arkus have both submitted and have voted on. Yep. So we should go through that list and and give like ten of them.

Jason Atwood: Top ten? Our favorites or whatever. Our favorite ones that we want people to vote on. That have not been delivered and we want people to vote on. So basically plug our own ideas.

Justin Edelstein: Well not ours but ones that we voted on. Oh. Okay. I mean some of them could be ours but but just go through the ones that we voted on that we want. Great. We're doing that. We're so doing that. I want to see you right now.

Jason Atwood: Not now, I can't type. We're in the middle of talking. That's true. It's not like you have a laptop right in front of you either. Well, I mean, going back to the degradation, that's, it's something that happens. It always brings up that story and I probably told it on the podcast, but if you're a new podcast listener, bear with me. Thank you. But when I worked at that big firm, when you worked there too, although I think it was before you joined, we had a puge outage. We were a, I was in the website division or whatever, the internet division, called internet marketing, or internet marketing. And they were basically backed by a mainframe. Yeah. The whole thing ran on a mainframe. Right on. All web servers were small web servers but then there was a big mainframe that was the database.

Jason Atwood: And I don't know if you if for those of you out there know about mainframes, mainframes are great and very stable and you know keep on trucking but if you reboot them they take up to 12, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes to reboot because it's it's It has to go down and back up again. It's a big, big process. It's not like this machine that probably reboots in 30 seconds or a minute. So someone sat down at the end of it was two. There was the production server and the test server, the test mainframe. And they're literally physically different things, but there's different keyboards. And someone sat down and went. to reboot the test one and hit, you know, put in the command, are you sure, hit yes, and it brought down everything. It brought down an entire website that was getting, you know, millions of hits or whatever, and it brought down for 30 to 40 minutes as everything had to come back up again.

17:12 Jason Atwood: And so in the meeting when the technology people were trying to explain to us, because I was on the business side, they tried to explain to us, well, this is what happened, you know, of course, I think my boss at the time said, Why don't you just have like a sticker on the keyboard that says production? Wouldn't that just make sense like why not just you know, I don't know That's probably a 10 cent change just put one that says test and then one on another keyboard that says

Justin Edelstein: Production Why couldn't they just put them at different desks? I move them across the room from each other. There's so many simple non-technologies. Or how about, you know,

Jason Atwood: When, you know, the, are you sure? Because it always asks you, Linux servers or Unix servers ask you when you reboot, I guess most do, but they ask you by the command line, are you sure you want to do this? You know, maybe, maybe put in another line of code that says... are you really sure? This is a production system. Please type in the name of your boss, we'll fire you if you do that. Kind of like Salesforce's refresh of the sandbox. Send the email. All right. It sounds like it's still going, yes? Well, it looks like they're going to keep it...

Justin Edelstein: In info. In the info mode until the whole instance is re-indexed. Right. But they're going through it now, they know the issue, they're solving it and they're re-indexing everything over the course of the next few weeks.

Jason Atwood: Interesting that it takes weeks to re-index. Well there's a lot of data I imagine. Yeah, I mean that's something. So maybe Salesforce needs to put a, you know... sticky on something so maybe it's production and then last up in our agenda this week is Amazon launching a marketplace well it should be more they have many marketplaces in fact Amazon is a marketplace that is crap but they're,re launching a marketplace for their it's an AWS mark space for us so it's for their cloud services Which you I had not seen this is snuck by me But allows you to find applications that you can then Instantly install and run on their AWS cloud infrastructure Which is there, you know to boot up like virtual machines and you pay by the hour for processing It's like got all this stuff in it.

Jason Atwood: Very cool because it's one of the things about the Amazon Web Services AWS that is so sort of daunting is it's not easy. I've done it and it's not like click, click, go. K,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

20:37 Justin Edelstein: Look at that, look at that, look- Which is pretty interesting that you know, they've just just launched it and there's you know 341

Jason Atwood: Apps in yeah, definitely something I want to play with I went and looked for Splone cuz I like who that'd be cool this point now again Remember for the all you out there you're paying for like the computing power So it's a little bit They always say when you boot one up remember to shut down cuz you don't shut down. It'll just keep going like I'm looking at One, here It's two cents an hour you know, AWS and they have really built out a great environment. All started from the history of where they had excess capacity because Amazon would prepare I would say so you wrote in here as a talking point late to the party

Justin Edelstein: A and the and- you know, players that Yeah, but they're always booting up a stack, basically a stack.

Jason Atwood: So, but you're starting off with a hardware virtualization, then you're throwing, then you're throwing an operating system on top of that, and then you're throwing on top of that, you're throwing some sort of applications. It's nice to see them there because it's always, to me.

Justin Edelstein: And this Amazon thing, I'm a jiggy. Like I know it's... I know It's super powerful but I don't know I can't boot anything up on it You know like make it easy for me put a put a Interface

Jason Atwood: On top of it where I can click and install software and yeah, that's that's the thing It's generally getting you a win. It's generally getting a Unix variety Thing these are all pre bundled so it runs all the scripts to get them started So like that software that we. We use all the time They've done this but they've done it internally and it kind of builds it out as they go. It basically builds a box, gets it up, puts their software on it, and then boots up the box for you to use. I think it's great. I actually want to go play with it more. I'd love to go try. I mean, I'll go sign up, spend a couple bucks, you know, and try some of them just to see how it works and like how far does it go down the path.

24:14 Jason Atwood: Like, do I get to click, click, click, and then... get sent a login and then I'm on a web interface or then I do have to boot down to you know those the SSH into something. Anyway really interesting. Thanks for pointing out. I'm excited. That's good stuff. All right other stuff I'm completely excited about. CloudFocus at Pics of the Week. Go Justin,

Justin Edelstein: Now. Alright. No, go. You want me to stop or go? Go now. What do you want from me? Go now. I'm picking a free plug-in or add-on or whatever they call them now for Firefox called Rest Client.

Jason Atwood: Oh, a Firefox plug-. Mm-hmm. Extension?

Justin Edelstein: I don't a. I think they used to be called extensions now they're called add- bons it's called rest client It's all one word you can find it at rest client net and it's a very simple interface Built right into firefox that you can send You know you can send messages to a a rest api and get the body, get the results.

Jason Atwood: Why would you want to send anything to a REST API? It's a debugging tool.

Justin Edelstein: If you're doing integrations, if you're mucking around with the REST API, and you need to send things to it and get the results in a body in a nice, easy to, don't want to leave your browser kind of way. Last night, after dinner, I was mucking around with some REST APIs. Sometimes you're just mucking around with REST APIs. Free. really well done, very easy to use, clean user interface.

Jason Atwood: And it's available for what? I'm not sure what that is. What is that? That is a browser. Ha! I have not booted up my Firefox in at least.

Justin Edelstein: Well Rest Client was a good reason to boot up my Firefox. That is good. Because it's a nice, easy, free, simple, dead simple way to, you know, send queries. Please to an API and get the results in a body.

Jason Atwood: I will say just on a side note, a great, great pick. I have not used it. I might not use it. But if you have not checked out Firefox in a while, they have done a ton of work and they are also burning through versions. They are currently on 9 and I just booted it up and it's now downloading a 9 something.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I boot my Firefox all the time. And what are you on? I'm on 11. Okay, 11.0. I'm still on 9.

Jason Atwood: So it's really really taken off. I will say the problem I've had in the past with Firefox updates is they update so fast that the extensions can't keep up. And so like the ones I use and love that I used to use like web, they have all these SEO ones and webmaster tools. I could I could do an entire show of pics for Firefox extensions. I can never use them because they always says not compatible not compatible not compatible. But anyway, very cool. So what it's a rest Rest a client rest client. Oh for Firefox and free my pick is not free My pick is something that For all of you who want to go paperless and want to scan things you can scan things with scanners obviously But in the last couple of weeks, I've been you know more and more I've been moving around I don't want to scan things.

27:35 Jason Atwood: I actually saw an ad you've probably seen on commercial For the neat neat scanner that they you know They say take it on the go take it with you Right and had a little portal one I actually own one of those I always think about taking this box with me to scan things. They're always when you're at a conference, conference on vacation, you want to scan things in. And I'm like, I, I don't want to take a piece of hardware. So I can scan in five receipts. So I went looking around, you know, for other software. And I think this showed up on a list of like 10 must. Must have business software or something or and it's called Scanner Pro. and it is a iOS application. They might have a version for Android. Do not know.

Jason Atwood: It is universal, which is very nice. So it works on both the iPad and the iPhone. And it does a very basic thing, although does it well. And that's sort of nice. You take pictures of documents. It then builds them into... PDFs and then you can do something with them. So you can send them to Dropbox or email them. I actually emailed you one the other day in pre-testing for this show a listing of apartments.

Justin Edelstein: Oh that was from this? Yes that's why it looked so crappy. Yeah it looked very crappy.

Jason Atwood: Sorry. No, I mean, well, you've got all these settings I haven't really figured out, but I've done some other ones that look great. But basically you take a picture, it recognizes where the thing is, it does some recognition, and then allows you to sort of send it to different places. Or you can store it. The one feature it does that kind of makes it, well, why is this different than taking a picture? Thank you.

Justin Edelstein: You're about to ask that. I was about to say, why can't I just take a picture of things? Stop! Okay,

Jason Atwood: The, because what- you can take a picture of one and then I'll say, okay, next page, take a picture, next page. So you can basically take five or six pictures and it'll build it into one PDF for you on your device. That's kind of nice. So, it is. So, it is. It is. It is. It is. $6.99 which on the app store is sort of towards the high, but if you think you're not buying a scanner to do this Now this isn't for scanning 50 documents at home. The scanner I have at home, which I love, ScanPro, Fujitsu ScanPro 5000 or 5200 or 3210 or whatever, I can throw in a stack of 50 documents, hit go, and it goes ggggggggg. And sends them over to me. That's great. This is not for that.

Jason Atwood: But this is if you get a document signed or you guys send it back as a PDF. We have a the person who should not be named had this problem the other day and if he had this piece of software He would have been able to do this because he was like oh my printer is not acting up I'm gonna scan a couple pieces of paper and you know three to four to five Builders PDF and send them to somebody it's a pretty good app and it does what it does nice integration with web clients So it can do Dropbox You can do iCloud, I think, and it can do one other. It can do any web dev, so if you have a web dev client, it can do that as well. So it's Scan Pro for $6.99 available on the iTunes app store, whatevs.

Jason Atwood: Try it out. I bought it. I've been using it, again, just a nice wherever you are, take a picture, and go. Alright, so that's it for this week as I have my Firefox reboots You always go to blog.arcasynch.com don't you? Every single day so the new blog post will be up soon I told you not to publish the podcast and the blog post on the same day So one will follow we'll do the podcast first and the blog post be right after But there's always new blog post a week and there's probably always a podcast week. So go there to figure it out Also, follow us on arkaseinc, twitter.com slash arkaseinc, or facebook.com slash arkaseinc, which if you want to communicate with us or see, what we're doing. I'm at Jason at Twitter.com slash Jason at with Justin's at Twitter.com slash just Eddlestein and We're also on Google+.

31:23 Jason Atwood: If you're there There are people there and we are there, too And you can subscribe on iTunes if you want to get a podcast on our favorite insta cast if you missed one of our one of our episodes. Still using it? Still using it? Everyday. Yeah, love it. And we'd love for you to leave a review. Hadn't had some reviews. If you're on iTunes, we'd love for you to leave a review of the podcast there. That would be great. And that's it for us from Justin and myself here at CloudFocus Weekly saying enjoy those cloudy days.

Justin Edelstein: I'll see you next time.