Simon Willison’s Weblog

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December 2012

Dec. 26, 2012

Which are the best front-end schools in London, UK?

General Assembly in Clerkenwell run several intensive courses relating to front-end web development that look very good.

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Where do I find a detailed financial report of Wikimedia Foundation on a business year, specially about outgoings?

Their annual report is published here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/w...

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Dec. 27, 2012

How great do you need to be in programming to be a technical (Co) founder?

You don’t need to be amazing, but you do need to know how to ship. You might be the best person at writing complex machine learning algorithms in the world, but if you can’t get running code deployed in a way that lets customers use it you won’t be able to get anywhere that matters.

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Why do so many newspapers have astrology columns?

Partly because there is demand for it (if a newspaper stopped running horoscopes they would likely lose some of their subscribers to rival publications. Mainly, I imagine, for cash: At least in the UK, most newspaper horoscope pages are accompanied by adverts for premium rate phone numbers that provide a “personal” horoscope service.

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Dec. 28, 2012

How can I detect manual record insert from mysql cansole into my code in django .?

You can’t. The best you can do is have Django periodically poll MySQL to see if anything has changed (maybe with a custom management command run by cron)—having a TIMESTAMP field on every table which will be automatically set to the current time when a record is inserted will help you spot things that have changed.

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Dec. 31, 2012

What are some useful techniques and tricks using list comprehension?

List comprehensions are neat, but generators are even neater (and if you understand tricks with generators you’ll be able to use list comprehensions more effectively as well). Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers by David Beazley will blow you mind—it’s full of useful real-world examples as well. Read that, then check out his follow-up tutorial A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency.

[... 81 words]

2012 » December

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