All this performance comparison business began when I installed the fairly bleeding edge AppEngine CMS Vosao. At first, I put most of the site specific CSS (core BlueTrip CSS files were served statically) into Vosao resources, and the site performed ok, but probably not quite as fast as I expected.

Then I remembered the blog post on 22 Michaels about their SEO strategy, and I remembered they are using AppEngine in their development citing performance as one as the primary reasons. Having a look at the code for their Shoes of Prey site (shoes aren’t really my thing, but tech is) it appears likely that their CSS, javascript and image resources are being served from static folders; and their site performance is quite acceptable.

So I moved my site specific resources out of the CMS and into static files and got an increase in performance. This was probably only in the order of a 100 – 200ms improvement for each file, but this definitely adds up.

Well, once you start down a performance investigation, it’s pretty hard to stop, so then I began to wonder how AppEngine performs against the likes of Rackspace CloudFiles. Well to say it’s like chalk and cheese would be an understatement. You will see some posts around the web suggesting how you can use AppEngine like a Content Delivery Network – just ignore them, they are just being silly. There is nothing CDN like AppEngine at all (at least not at the moment). It’s a great service and I love it, but my understanding is that there are two datacentre’s serving AppEngine applications – a primary and a backup, not a globally distributed network of edge servers. If you think I’m exaggerating have a look at the resource load times that were returned using Pingdom’s Full Page Test Tool for my 52Kb test image:

One point of note is that initial test for the Rackspace CDN from Pingdom returned a much higher time for the image when I first requested the result, and this I expect was due to the need for the image to be moved to the closest server in the CDN for subsequent deliveries. I’m actually suspecting that with response times like that, the Pingdom servers must be hosted very close to the Rackspace edge nodes indeed. I can attest to faster ping and load times on images for Rackspace hosting than CloudFront from my desktop here in Australia though also.

Feel free to have a look at the archived tests too using the following links:

Vosao managed resource Sidelab site check
AppEngine static file Sidelab site check
Amazon CloudFront CDN Sidelab site check
RackSpace CloudFiles CDN Sidelab site check

If you look at these results, you will see there is lots of work around combining CSS and javascript files, creating CSS sprites, etc. still to do; but you will also see the big change for that one particular 52Kb image. Just wait until the other files are in the RackSpace cloud.

For those of you who have gotten this far in the article, and followed a few links might have checked out my new under construction site. If not, feel free to check it out at www.sidelab.com. Like I said though, it is definitely in the construction stage and still some way away from being finished.

Update (03/03/2010)
At this stage, I am also trialling Amazon CloudFront as RackspaceCloud does not yet support using a CNAME record to point to your CloudFiles container. This is a feature that is coming in the near future, but as I require that support right now, I am going to use CloudFront to get started with. The reason I found the need to use CNAME records is that downstream filtering proxies (IronPort, etc.) may choose to filter out traffic they see coming from hosting sites based on the domain name alone. As such images I was serving off the rackspace CDN were being blocked on the site – certainly not ideal and something I would like to avoid.

Affiliate Disclaimer
Also please note, that Distractable is associated with a Rackspace affiliate program; and while the tests were conducted using RackSpace CloudFiles any genuine Content Delivery Network would offer similar performance improvements.

We believe in full disclosure, and our full list of associated affiliates is available for review.

Depression’s Upside @ NYTimes.com

My Thoughts
Well for my own experience, I think the article is a very accurate depiction of my own mental state (certainly at the moment). The illustration of depression coming about in response to certain external stimuli in the same way that the body’s immune system responds to infection is especially powerful. Kudos for the article also goes for stating that it is still too early to “judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis”, as there are obviously a great number of theories about depression and this will obviously become another one of the bunch. Like I said though, I do identify with the majority of what is said.

On the flipside, while I am encouraged by the thoughts put forward in the article, I am also very mindful that the analytic-rumination hypothesis offers little comfort to the loved ones who live with us who exhibit this behaviour. If this is the way I was created, then I believe a few things are critical in my response to my behaviour:

1. To work with my family to be able to inject the appropriate space in life to effectively ruminate and analyse, thereby compressing the amount of “down-time” required to process the stimuli that has triggered the state.

2. To develop the wisdom to know when there are factors outside of my control in a situation, and develop the ability to effectively “file the case” until additional evidence is acquired, ready for processing.

3. Work on my ultimate goal of being able to take a holiday from “Analytic-Rumination Damon”. While my belief is the condition is something very core to my being, I will strive towards creating periods of time (ideally weeks) where I process information differently. It’s definitely something that I have the ability to do, but does require getting some of the big decisions sorted and then a choice to just “go with it” and see it right.

By collaboratively working on each of the points above, hopefully the depressive condition can be made more manageable for both myself and my family. As always would be interested in hearing others opinions on the article or my response.

Amazon AWS EC2
If you didn’t already know EC2 stands for “Elastic Compute Cloud”, and in it’s name lies it’s strength. EC2 has been designed first and foremost for the provision of flexible (or elastic) computing power to meet your demand. So if you have a some background processes that you need to run that are going to have varying resource (CPU, memory, etc) requirements over time, Amazon EC2 is well suited to this. Supporting services such as the Elastic Block Store and Elastic IP addresses enable you to start and stop instances with relative ease and transparency to services that you are interacting with.

To my mind however, if you want to stand up a website that can handle scalable load then EC2 really isn’t the solution. Not on it’s own at least – combine it with something like RightScale and you do have an effective, albeit rather expensive solution.

So in summary, when you require elasticity think Amazon EC2.

Rackspace
Now rackspace on the surface seem to be a very similar service to AWS. Rackspace have applied a different methodology to the cloud hosting, and using their background and experience with regards to hosting websites have come up with some pretty solid offerings. Now firstly, CloudFiles I can probably take or leave in favour of Amazon S3 – happy to use either service.

Next we have CloudServers. Basically think EC2 but not as elastic. This isn’t a bad thing – if your processing power needs aren’t particularly variable then you can save yourself a dollar or two by going with rackspace over AWS. You won’t be able to start and stop instances as easily as you can with EC2 though, and without an equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Block Store, you will have to use HTTP access to other persistent storage rather than the filesystem.

The real appeal though (at least on the surface it seems) is their CloudSites product. Whilst I haven’t spent the money and started using their “from $149 per month” service it does seem like a very competitive and scalable equivalent to EC2 + Right Scale (which from memory starts at around $500 per month).

Another thing that’s interesting about Rackspace is… they have people. Account activation involves one of their staff ringing you (yes even if you live in Australia) to activate your account. Whilst I was a little taken aback that this was required at first, it does reinforce that the RackspaceCloud option is a professional offering.

Conclusion
As I said when I started the post, there is no “right option” with either of these two fine products. For me, however, I have been able to define some quick rules (excuse my very rough pseudocode).

If (server_requirement = Website) Then
  If (new_website_build) Then
    CloudHost = AppEngine # yes I still like AppEngine
  Elsif (money = Abundant) Then
    CloudHost = Rightscale_EC2
  Else
    CloudHost = Rackspace
Else
  If (server_availablity = 24x7) And (server_load = Constant) Then
    CloudHost = Rackspace
  Else
    # this covers variable server availability, server load or development requirements
    CloudHost = EC2  # see nifty techniques using Amazon SQS

Right then, any questions?

While, I think the idea was good in practice, it wasn’t the right time. My current struggle is attempting to determine if now is the right time.

Learning and planning some personal growth
Back then, I realized pretty early on that I didn’t have all of the right pieces of the puzzle. I had no idea if I could scale effectively, whether I could effectively manage staff, or even which technologies to build my business around (I tend to be a bit of a jack of all trades). Oh, and my wife and I wanted to start thinking about having a family sometime soon also. So I decided to take an offer to move back as a permanent employee of the company I worked for before jetsetting off to the UK.

One of my key drivers for going back to full-time work (apart from the need for a stable income) was to address some of those questions that I had stumbled across in my six month small business “entree”. So at that stage, I set myself a very clear roadmap (not written down mind you…) to push myself in uncomfortable directions to get some answers. I needed to know if I could manage people and be effective in the business side of things in addition to being a good coder.

The plan was simple, and I followed my code of being open and honest. I communicated to my manager and executive manager that I had a strong desire to grow my business smarts so I could one day go back out and run my own business successfully. Through ongoing conversations, opportunities to explore and grow my business skills in that environment came about, and I would certainly have to say over the last five years, I have achieved far more than I ever would have thought back then.

My original goals once again beckon; however, and I again need to contemplate what to do.

When do you have enough to start out on your own?
Right now, I am trying to decide between:

1. Going out and starting up my own business; or
2. Joining another company doing similar things to what I have done before (stuff I actually really like doing).

Both options look reasonably solid; I’ve got work lined up if I start out on my own so I’m not too worried about initial cash flow (down the track it all gets a bit hazy). I do however have two young kids, and my wife and I made a conscious decision that she was going to be a full-time mum – so the family is dependent on my “bread winning” ability. Also the company that I have an offer from looks to be offering a position that I should find quite rewarding. Being a good logical person, I have put together a spreadsheet comparing the options against weighted categories. Alas the numbers do not reveal a clear and obvious winner.

Right now, I would love to hear some other people’s experiences about starting their own businesses (ideally in the IT space), or those who decided not to (but wanted to) and have continued on with rewarding careers working for others. Please – if you have a story to tell I would love to hear it. If you’ve written (or read) a post or article previously, just drop the link in here with any useful comments and I’ll have a read. Don’t worry I am not going to make my decision based on your story alone, but the more information I have now the more empowered I will feel to make a decision, and then to make that decision right.

My gut says do it, I guess it has been for as long as I can remember. I’ve also been preparing for quite a while, have most things ready to go, but am mindful that two little people and a loving wife are along for the ride.

Now there are a lot of articles out there that give pointers on how optimize your blog/site to reduce bounce rate, so I’m not even going to try and talk about that here. If you are after a good source of information, however, I’d recommend checking out problogger. What I am going to talk about though, is how you can use Google Analytics to determine where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics is very good at showing your overall bounce rate, but you can get more detail and start targeting particular posts and keywords to reduce that bounce rate.

Right, let’s get started:

Update: While the instructions below definitely give a good overview of how to complete the task, I subsequently decided to put together a screencast that guides you through the process more slowly. For those who like textual instructions, the original instructions are below the screencast.

Firstly, head over the Google Analytics top content report, which can be found under Content > Top Content.

Next, add the keywords for the content to the report. The image to the right shows how to do this, but basically look for the drop-down list to the right of the Page column heading.

Activate the advanced filter so we remove all of those pages that haven’t been hit as the result of an organic search.

Add a filter to exclude the string “(not set)”, removing those non organic search pages.

Now switch Google Analytics to the performance view of the report. This can be done by selecting the third icon along in the views selector, which is located top-right above the report table.

Now that you are in performance reporting mode, switch the performance field over to reporting on bounce rate. This can be done by selecting “Bounce Rate” from the individual page performance drop-down in the column heading of the report.

The end result will look something like what’s displayed below. Thankfully I’m not too susceptible to stats-envy

Now to make this report truly useful, I would recommend extending the timeline for the report to longer than a month (at least when first analysing the data). For my blog, I chose a six-month period. It’s certainly very telling. For me, I can see that I’m getting a fair bit of organic search traffic for android web applications on my iPhone and Android Web Application Frameworks post. Certain keyword combinations do better than others, but overall this could definitely be improved. So what does this tell me. Well if I have a few posts in the wings, then if I’m thinking about one related to Android that should take priority. Post it, and make sure I promote it from the post getting good organic traffic.

Finally, I used the Google Analytics export to PDF functionality to provide myself a good optimization worksheet. Before I did this though I did add an additional filter to cull some of the lesser visited pages on my site.

Anyway, I hope that’s as helpful to someone else as I found it myself, and certainly if there are other useful Google Analytics tips that people know I’d certainly love to hear about it.

While I have always attempted to be as open as possible with my managers (given the impact the condition has on them), I have found it much more difficult to be open about things with my peers and people who work for me. Well today, I just chose to tell it how it was, and I honestly think that was the best thing to do. That does, however, mean I need to be this open with everyone so I am not putting others in a difficult situation of knowing something about me that is not widely known.

I liken my ongoing battle with depression akin to running in “thongs” (for non Aussies you would know them as flip-flops, a piece of footwear that does take some effort to move quickly in). I emphasize that this is an analogy that helps explain my situation, but depression is such a varied condition that it will be completely inadequate to describe the way it affects someone else.

Like running in thongs? How so?
Well I’m a pretty ambitious guy. Not ambitious in a desire for power or money, but absolutely ambitious with regards to a desire for rich and meaningful knowledge and life experience. As a result I’ve had a very rewarding professional, personal and spiritual life – I’m a respected manager and peer at work, a loved husband and father (for which I’m grateful – @SquiggleMum and the kids) and a committed Christian since I was a teenager.

I reckon with my level of ambition, I spend most of my waking hours mentally and emotionally running. Add inappropriate footwear (depression) into the mix, and well, I’m going to stumble; or get very tired feet. In certain situations, such as high-pressure or high-expectation life situations it is more like running in thongs on sand, or up an escalator. It’s more demanding on the individual and also more likely to result in damage. I can point you in the direction of a couple of youtube videos that illustrate the point nicely, but also ruin my attempt at a serious blog post. What can I say, it’s a gift.

My History
I was first officially diagnosed with depression about eight years ago, when my wife became increasingly concerned with my mental state and we began seeing an excellent psychologist. That day feels like a long time ago now, and from that time I have been medicated for the condition with varying levels of success. How long have I actually had depression? Did it start eight years ago? No, probably not. When I reflect back on my life I recall feeling desperately low prior to that time. I can certainly recall periods back when I was a teenager when it all just seemed too hard, but then I think it probably did for everyone.

I’m sure some will want to know whether I have ever been suicidal. I guess the short answer is: “I’ve never attempted to end my own life”. Have I wished that I could just get off the merry-go-round or sit on the sideline for a little while – absolutely. Have I caused myself physical pain on occasion? Actually yes. Not for a long time, and it’s horribly stupid but yes – at the time it seems like one of the only ways to bring everything into equilibrium. You are mentally and emotionally hurting, but physically you are fine. It just seems so wrong and hard to process, and thus you give yourself something easier to digest.

Medication and Treatment
When I was first diagnosed with depression, I felt certain that medication would be required and wasn’t sure how this would affect my life. It was required and didn’t really destroy my ability to interact and operate with other people in a fairly normal manner. Has it been effective at treating the condition? Yes and no, primarily in the the last 5-6 years it probably has been.

I did have to accept what the purpose of the medication was before it really started to do its job though. 5 years ago, I started going to see a psychiatrist in addition to a psychologist. At the time I though this was completely over the top. Best thing I ever did though. The thing I really appreciated was his straight-forwardness. Basically, I didn’t fall into any of the nicely labelable and treatable forms of depression. Was I bipolar? I had some of the signs, but not to the extent for that particular label to apply. So what was a suitable treatment then? Before that time, I had tried about three different types of meds which I wouldn’t consider very effective.

Solution? For my situation, take less potent medication (basically a mood stabilizer) and start taking some serious responsibility for my own mental condition. In my case, medication was only part of the solution and I had to take some responsibility for taking care of the “stinking thinking” that I get caught up in; such as, worrying about situations that I have no control over of, etc, etc. Easier said than done, definitely, but absolutely critical in managing a depressive illness. Something I’ll probably be doing for the rest of my life.

Wrapping Up and my Sincere Thanks
There is a lot more that I could talk about with regards to this, but I would stress I am no expert. Just a guy who’s been living with the condition for quite some time. The way we each as individuals deal with the situation will vary greatly, both as people who carry the condition and those who live, love and work with others who carry it. People struggling with depression aren’t alien, and thankfully we live in an age where less of a stigma is attached to the disease. That still doesn’t make it easy to talk about it. Certainly not for me, and there will be those of you reading this that will be thinking – man, I never knew that about Damon. Well I guess you do now – but try not to treat me any different, cut me slack or offer sympathy or condolences. In my situation, that’s not something I desire or that is helpful. Just remember that I’m running this race called life in a pair of thongs and I occasionally get tired feet or trip up. One day, maybe I’ll get myself a nice pair of running shoes or learn how to take it a little easier and walk a little; but I suspect not.

To those who have known about this and supported me in the past, you have my heartfelt thanks. I have been truly blessed with great people around me that have made my life up until this point very rewarding. I’ve been given opportunities to progress at work, with people being aware of my condition and willing to take some of that risk on based on their belief in me. My wife has been very patient and understanding over the years, and even my kids are starting to understand that Daddy needs some space now and then. My wider friends and family that know have acted in the way I have wanted them to, and haven’t treated me any different post me “coming clean with them”.

My thanks also go to people in the online world who are brave enough to be transparent with their situations. Without your bold contributions, it is unlikely I would have posted anything here today.

As I mentioned previously, more than happy to talk to anyone about my experience of depression and answer questions both here on the blog, via email or face-to-face where possible.

I believe the web is currently informationally, functionally and economically constrained from further evolution.

We currently believe that a website’s traffic volumes are an accurate measure of success – and thus an accurate reflection of monetization potential. The message of a post that was published on Mashable yesterday suggests that competitive analysis tools such as Quantcast and Compete offer an accurate measurement of the success of a web entity. Although some possible explanations are offered for Twitter’s waning usage, that is the general tone. I am pleased to see the Twitter CEO challenged the claims, although I’m sure his claims have been met with a healthy dose of skepticism (which is probably fair).

Do we all really think that Twitter’s website traffic is a wholly accurate measure? I do use the Twitter web client (and I expect to be ridiculed for this), thus contributing to the web traffic but I also use Tweetie on the iPhone too – and the likes of Quantcast and Compete have zero visibility of that. So I really don’t know how it is truly possible, even in this case when we aren’t attempting to compare Twitter with another site, purely trending its own traffic volumes.

The Web with a different ego?
My personal opinion is that Twitter represents a different kind of “web ego”. Twitter’s growth and success is generally associated with concepts of immediacy and openness. Through open APIs developers around the world have taken a very simple concept and created a multitude of applications, and each of these apps has assisted in growing Twitter as a web presence and brand. Do you think that Quantcast and Compete have visibility of the traffic that each of these applications is pushing into Twitter? I don’t think so. The likes of Facebook and friends would have gladly stayed closed entities; representing the old “web ego”, if it hadn’t been for Twitter coming along and mixing it up a little. Yes Facebook is an amazingly successful web platform, and it deserves some respect, but its business model (ye olde advertising) is very much tied to site visitors interacting on the actual facebook site.

I guess some would say: “At least facebook has a business model”. I think that is fair comment. Without doubt Twitter’s biggest challenge is how to continue to grow and actually start to show some return on investment to those companies that have helped them grow to this point. I hope they solve that one though, because if the next generation of web sites/apps/services can be freed from single-dimensional measures of success and comparison, I think we will see some really interesting things happen.

Update:
ReadWriteWeb has published an article that talks to Twitter’s actual growth (in terms of tweet volume). I think that article nicely illustrates why services like Compete can’t really now do what they set out to do with websites – even though RWW guys don’t talk about difficulty with tracking, when you refer back to the Mashable post you can definitely sense the contradiction.

The first of those will be an experiment using Google’s AppEngine as a front-end proxy to a less robust website, hosted on low-cost hosting. Whilst not sure, I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be able to give my self-hosted wordpress blog a layer of resilience with some app-engine mem-caching goodness.

The basic principle behind the idea is to implement a simple site proxy on Google AppEngine and make use of AppEngine’s memcache to provide relief to the rather cheap shared hosting that I currently run this blog on. In this way, should I ever write an extremely compelling post then my blog won’t get smashed by the SlashDot / Digg effect. The diagram below illustrates in very simple terms the relationship between the sites.

So, basically:

• The AppEngine application passes through all GET request through to the parent site, storing a copy of the page in memcache before serving the content back. If the specific url was already memcached then that it is returned from the AppEngine site without a round-trip to the parent server.
• POST requests are result in a cache-clear for the url, then the round-trip to the parent server. Then the request is handled in the same manner as a GET request.
• I’m thinking a plugin for the wordpress site is required, so that when I approve comments using the administration facility (I don’t think this should go through the AppEngine application) the WordPress site can instruct the front-end to clear the cache.

That’s the concept in a nutshell, and as pointed out by Glen Maddern when I mentioned I was thinking about this on Twitter, the same application should be able to act as a front-end layer for sites other than just WordPress Blogs. Static sites would just work. Web applications are likely to be more problematic, which is good, as I’m really not in the business of creating tools to stand up a phishing site easily.

In terms of my own personal setup, I plan to www.distractable.net to the AppEngine application, and leave distractable.net pointing at the shared hosting. I’d probably go the other way around if AppEngine supported naked domains, but it doesn’t.

Would really appreciate any feedback on this idea, including those nice curly situations that are likely to make the whole thing fall in a heap

I’ll make sure I update the post with progress updates on how the coding is going – hopefully, if I can keep the blinkers on, then it should be done in a week or so. The source will be kept at GitHub, so feel free to watch the repo if you like to keep up-to-date that way.

UPDATE 11/01/2010:
Looks like there is already a project that is attempting to use AppEngine in a similar way, but as a downstream proxy for browsing. I am unfortunately not fluent in the native tongue of the maintainer of the project, but if you would like to take a look here is a link to the project:

GAppProxy Project on GoogleCode

Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t really worry too much – my thoughts are around what can be done with the API.

What is Sidewiki
To understand what we can do with the Sidewiki API, we should probably first understand what Sidewiki is. My understanding is that Sidewiki allows known users to add and retrieve Sidewiki entries (conforming to the Google Data Protocol) for a particular webpage URI. Simple enough, but creates a bit of controversy when it’s primary advertised use is for commenting on any website without allowing moderation by the site owner.

Taking a step back
Most of the chatter around Sidewiki is it’s use as a mechanism for commenting on or annotating websites. Well, yes that’s its primary purpose. What else could it be used for though?

At it’s core it is a series of date-time stamped, content entries by a number of separate “known” authors about a particular webpage URI. Does it have to be an actual webpage? Could we use a URI in the same way that is used in RDF to describe a unique global object, and then allow people to comment on that particular object (like the Eiffel tower for instance)? I guess that depends on whether Google require that an actual webpage be associated with the URI (not something I know the answer to yet).

More possibilities than Twitter?
Taking a look at the surface of Twitter we see a very simple concept (ableit technically challenging to implement) that both users and developers have taken places not originally envisaged by its creators. In essence, Sidewiki offers a similar opportunity for developers and users to apply some of the Twitter symbologies such as @ symbol and the # tag to apply extra context to a sidewiki entry which could possibly allow other applications to make use of the global collaboration space essentially created by Sidewiki.

Note: Currently the Sidewiki API does not allow free text searches, however, the broader Google Data API specification does. With some encouragement Google may implement that feature into Sidewiki.

What can be built?
Well, I’ve got a bit of investigating to do before I have any specific ideas, but as mentioned the ability to collaborate on a unique world object would be particularly interesting (but not without it’s challenges – ala the semantic web).

Certainly a lot of the applications we have seen built using twitter as a communication layer could make use of Sidewiki instead. Simply replacing a unique identifying hashtag with a unique URI for a an item being collaborated on instead would make for a very simple transition.

Be interested in hearing your thoughts and seeing any cool applications that you have sandpitted using the Sidewiki APIs…

So what is Thounds? Well read on…

What is Thounds?
Well firstly, it’s a silly word that I’m not a big fan of. It doesn’t do the site or what they are trying to achieve any justice, but like others before them the folks at thounds have come up with a great idea and any domain name that would have been any good is taken so they have ended up with thounds.com (well that’s my opinion at least).

In a nutshell, Thounds is a collaborative recording interface, simple enough, but looking at the tour very powerful. Now it’s been a while since I’ve used any of the recording gear I have around the place, but I have to say this enthuses me to do so. I wouldn’t need to though, obviously any microphone plugged into your computer will do the job, but if you have good kit you may as well use it right?

Using Thounds
Using thounds is a simple as throwing on some headphones (simply to prevent audio leakage), and then hitting the record button on a little flash widget they have on the site. The widget includes the useful ability to have a metronome playing in the background (note this gets a little screwy on linux – I had a funk rhythm section going instead of a steady beat) which will keep you in time for your loop you are recording.

Now I would say, thounds is targeted at capturing musical ideas and making the collaboration part of creating music fun and enjoyable. If you are a pro muso I think you will get value out of it, but for more serious online music creation I would probably recommend you check out something like Indaba instead.

Why Super Cool?
Why is thounds super cool? Well in my very recently formulated super cool checklist it gets a tick in every box (for now at least):

• It does one thing, and one thing very well (see Apple)
• It attempts to engage all people through a clever idea – it gives people a sense of being something bigger (clever tour video captures this nicely).
• It has a low “barrier to entry”. While something like Indaba is brilliant in both its technical execution and presentation, it doesn’t hit people where they are at, and give them one simple thing to get started with. Thounds does that.

Anyway, just my thoughts, recommend you go check it out and make up your own mind. I’m going to see if I can get time to grab the guitar out between coding and have a play on there – feel free to look me up