Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 5th August 2013

What’s the best way to expand your professional network?

Speak at events, and talk to people afterwards.

[... 74 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 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]

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]

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]

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]

How can I become a world-class coder in under three years?

Write code. Lots of code. Code that does stuff.

[... 95 words]

2013 » August

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