July 2013
July 28, 2013
Does preparing before a presentation actually help one’s presentation?
Yes, in all cases. Not preparing adequately is disrespectful to your audience.
[... 98 words]I have an idea for a website, with an idea for eventually having cashflow out of it? However, my skills are insufficient to build it and I have no money at all to hire someone—what’s my best starting point?
You either need to learn some skills, or you need to earn some money. Sadly, having a good idea is not enough—you need to be able to execute it as well.
[... 80 words]July 29, 2013
How can I successfully organize a conference?
PPK’s conference organisers handbook is crammed with useful advice on running this kind of event: http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/
[... 30 words]What’s an idea worth?
I like Derek Siver’s model proposed here: http://sivers.org/multiply
[... 77 words]How do professionals build and maintain their websites?
The HTML and CSS for large, professional websites is usually written by hand, in a text editor. Tools like Dreamweaver are avoided by most skilled web developers.
[... 69 words]Which companies in London are using Python?
We use Python/Django for http://lanyrd.com/—we’re based in London.
[... 39 words]Does creating a zip file with php use more RAM then CPU? Or vise versa? Also, is it faster to use a system call, or the php zip library? Exec (zip filename.zip) vs. $zip =new ZipArchive().
You can find out the answer yourself using a very simple benchmark—just call time() before and after each option and loop them a few thousand times to calculate an average.
[... 74 words]Do I need to change something on my LIVE website to do Remote usability testing? Am I needed to create a duplicate copy of my website?
You should be able to run a working copy (potentially with fake data or a subset of your production data) on your laptop, for development purposes. You can use the same setup for usability testing new features.
[... 96 words]July 30, 2013
What is the best way to notify participants of a planned meeting?
Google Calendar invites work really well—they’re sent via email and are reasonably usable even by people who don’t themselves use Google Calendar.
[... 42 words]What are some JavaScript concepts that took you the longest to understand?
Closures, prototype inheritance, and the “this” keyword.
[... 60 words]Is it difficult to make a dating site? My budget is small. Any suggestion?
Yes, it’s hard. Technologically, dating sites are not that complicated. The difficulty is keeping them populated enough that they remain useful for your users.
[... 159 words]What has Google given out at I/O in the past years?
I/O 2013 was a Chromebook Pixel (with or without LTE) and 1 terabyte of Google Drive space for three years.
[... 37 words]Would you pay for a service that allowed you to shadow people in your profession of interest?
As a high school student I would not have paid for this. It’s a big gamble (what if I spend money only to find out that the career doesn’t interest me), it relies on me having a good idea about what I want to do first (which I didn’t), it’s something I can get for free elsewhere by taking to friends of family, and I didn’t have any money to spend anyway.
[... 95 words]Presentations, when’s the best time to give your personal background?
It’s rarely a good idea to include this—usually it adds nothing to the audience’s understanding of presentation, unless you are speaking on a topic that really needs that additional authority (security presentations sometimes benefit from this)—in which case keep it to a couple of sentences, don’t share your entire professional history.
[... 90 words]July 31, 2013
How do I choose between asynchronous web frameworks? My tech group is fairly language agnostic and we’re trying to standardize on some technologies.
Since they are all pretty close to each other and it sounds like your tech group’s skills would support any of them, I would suggest having your tram build a simple prototype in all three so you can compare them for your own particular team and situation.
[... 76 words]Events (leisure): How do you organize a conferencce?
Read http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/—and good luck!
[... 21 words]What is the biggest team to join Y Combinator?
Larger teams that apply for YC generally have to nominate 2-3 “founders”, mainly for logistical reasons: there simply isn’t enough room at the dinners for larger groups. The non-founders don’t get to go to all of the dinners, though they can come along to a few of them as guests of the founders.
[... 68 words]