August 2013
Aug. 1, 2013
What honorarium is befitting for a guest speaker apart from money?
Here are a few ways you can treat your speakers really well.
[... 107 words]How can Quora be made 10x better? What features should they improve or introduce? What can Quorans contribute to improve Quora for all?
Stop hiding the content I provide behind a “log in to view this” wall. I no longer feel comfortable linking to my posts on Quora from elsewhere, which makes me strongly consider not writing things here any more.
[... 67 words]What are the best Craigslist advertisements of all time?
Hey Crackhead remains my all-time favourite craigslist posting. It’s too good to quote one extract—you just have to read the whole thing.
Aug. 3, 2013
Is it a good idea to wear your startup shirt in a tech conference?
If you are there to talk to people about your startup then sure, why not? Even better if your shirt says “ask me about X”—it’s cheesy but it works.
[... 51 words]Aug. 4, 2013
What are the most exciting sporting events in the world?
That’s easy... The Mongolian Golden Eagle Hunting Festival, held every October.
[... 48 words]Aug. 5, 2013
How can I become a world-class coder in under three years?
Write code. Lots of code. Code that does stuff.
[... 95 words]What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux?
Any and every operation you perform on a Linux server can be trivially automated by copying the commands you ran in to a text file. I haven’t managed a Windows server in years and I hear PowerShell is pretty great these days but an OS based around a GUI is always going to be harder to automate than one based around a command line.
[... 156 words]Does Google Ventures invest in native iOS applications?
Easy way to find out: take a look at the list of companies they’ve already funded: Google Ventures—Companies
[... 48 words]Why aren’t there any popular web frameworks in C/C++ even though they are more performance intensive languages?
Because it’s very hard writing secure code in them due to the way they handle memory management, and web applications have an enormous number of potential paths for malicious input. It’s much easier to write secure web application code in a higher level language (which isn’t to say it’s easy at all even then).
[... 77 words]What are the cheapest ways for a single man to eat in London without cooking?
24 hour fried chicken joints are a relatively cheap source of calories if you want hot food and don’t want to cook.
[... 50 words]What are the best use cases for Quip?
If you just want a word processor with good formatting options, Quip probably isn’t (yet) the right tool for you. Quip excels at collaborative document editing—if you need to write a blog post for your company’s blog with someone else, or put together a project plan, or collaborate on a report—all examples where effective collaboration on content is more important than formatting.
[... 80 words]What’s the best way to expand your professional network?
Speak at events, and talk to people afterwards.
[... 74 words]Aug. 6, 2013
How should I evaluate a potential technical co-founder? What qualities matter most to the business, to investors, to future employees?
Build a small weekend project with them. If they can’t build and (more importantly) ship something simple in a couple of days, with you collaborating with them effectively on what it is, how it should work and so on, they aren’t a good fit.
[... 70 words]Beginner JavaScript: more code or quality code?
Write more code. The more code you have written, the better you’ll be able to understand why certain techniques for creating higher quality code are worthwhile later on.
[... 70 words]Aug. 7, 2013
What steps can I take to protect my data in case my laptop gets stolen?
Set up full drive encryption—that way if someone steals your laptop they won’t be able to access your data without a password.
[... 95 words]What are the different ways in which web sites can be developed?
There are a few languages that provide an alternative syntax that compiles to HTML (Haml is quite a popular one) but generally you need to have a very good understanding of HTML in order to do any web development at all, no matter what server-side technology you use. Likewise for CSS—Sass and LESS provide alternative syntax that compiles to CSS, but they are no replacement for understanding how CSS actually works.
[... 94 words]Web app: what programming knowledge do I need to create a goings on app?
For this kind of application a much more important question than "how can I build it? is "where will I get the data from?"—If you don’t have a good answer for that building the app is a waste of your time. The world is littered with local events listings apps that no one uses because they don’t have good data.
[... 82 words]Aug. 8, 2013
Is there any alternative to devbootcamp.com or hackreactor.com in Europe?
http://www.makersacademy.com/ are running a similar program in the Old Street area of London.
Events (leisure): What are the best places in San Francisco for organizing a small meetup?
If it’s a technical event, there are dozens of tech companies with excellent facilities who might be convinced to host the event for free.
[... 45 words]What is the best resource for someone who is non-technical to learn about computer programming/creating software?
Learn to program. You don’t need to learn programming to the standard where you could work professionally as a software engineer, but having enough programming knowledge to write some simple programs and automate some simple tasks will make you enormously more capable when it comes to working with programmers—or in business life in general.
[... 135 words]Aug. 9, 2013
How does a VC decide to make an investment?
I suggest reading Paul Graham’s latest essay, How to Convince Investors.
[... 27 words]Aug. 10, 2013
Are there any alternatives to CGI for web servers?
Yes. CGI stopped being relevant around the turn if the century! Many languages can be embedded in web servers now (mod_php, mod_python, mod_perl for Apache etc), there’s the FastCGI protocol which allows web servers to communicate with external processes without needing to start a brand new process for every request, and it’s also common these days to run an HTTP server written in the same language as your application and proxy requests to it—Unicorn, gunicorn, Jetty are all examples of this.
[... 98 words]How can I find short-term work experience at a startup in London?
Take a look at www.enternships.com—lots of London startup intern opportunities listed there.
[... 33 words]Aug. 11, 2013
Can I pitch my app idea to google?
You could pitch it to Google Ventures, but you’ll need a lot more than just the idea.
[... 31 words]Aug. 12, 2013
What are some websites that can help me have people upvote or downvote a list of ideas?
Any web framework would be capable of this. In fact, it’s such a simple project it’s s great opportunity to build the same thing in more than one framework and find out for yourself which one you like best.
[... 66 words]How are you gonna solve when the user has a gender issue?
Don’t ask for gender at all, or if you do make the field optional or provide a text field that the user can put anything they like in.
[... 46 words]What are the most useful software everyone should use for programming and web development?
Some flavour of Linux.
[... 24 words]Aug. 13, 2013
What is a good onboarding process for a new employee at a startup?
Have them deploy the site on their first day. This ensures they know how to...
[... 174 words]If I told you "Get me a 20 minute meeting in front of xyz person and I’ll give you $20 whether or not they buy into what i have to offer, would you set up the meeting?
Absolutely not. My ability to make introductions relies on people trusting me to make good introductions. If I make a poor introduction to someone it damages or destroys my ability to make introductions to them in the future. If I get a reputation for selling introductions I’ll lose credibility with everyone in my network.
[... 97 words]How long should I budget for an experienced designer to design a responsive ecommerce store?
There’s no single answer to this—it depends on the scope of the project. A one-page store selling 3 items is quicker to design than a thousand page store with dozens of category homepages etc.
[... 87 words]