Simon Willison’s Weblog

The GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg. Some interesting titbits on Facebook’s architecture.

# 5:41 am / architecture, facebook, mark-zuckerberg, scaling

IE8 speeds things up. Steve Souders notes that IE8 downloads script files in parallel before executing them sequentially, giving it a significant speed boost over other browsers that download sequentially.

# 5:42 am / browsers, ie8, performance, steve-souders

What Sucks About Erlang. Damien Katz shares his greatest frustrations from working with Erlang on CouchDB.

# 5:45 am / couchdb, damien-katz, erlang

In Response to “What Sucks About Erlang”. Yariv Sadan responds to Damien’s criticism.

# 5:46 am / damien-katz, erlang, yarivsadan

python4ply tutorial. python4ply is a parser for Python written in Python using the PLY toolkit, which compiles to Python bytecode using the built-in compiler module. The tutorial shows how to use it to add support for Perl-style 1_000_000 readable numbers.

# 5:49 am / compilers, lexing, parsing, python, python4ply

Hacking Contributed Models. Neat Django trick using monkeypatching to make some minor tweaks to built-in contributed models such as auth or flatpages.

# 5:51 am / contrib, django, monkeypatching, python

Clickpass. Peter Nixey’s new OpenID startup has finally launched—does a great job of making OpenID more approachable with a clean, well designed UI and a neat orange button.

# 4:47 pm / clickpass, openid, peter-nixey, startup, usability