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Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design?
Yes: use percentage measurements for your layout components. That way you can build a website that works on a much larger range of screen sizes. You can combine this approach with media queries—for example, you could specify that your site has a 25% wide navigation menu and a 75% wide content area on devices that are wider than 400px, but any smaller than that and it collapses to a single column layout with the menu hidden and accessible only through a menu bar icon.
[... 102 words]What do business people look for in a good business card?
I like to encourage writing on business cards—which means that the card shouldn’t be glossy (to ensure pens work on it). Our business cards, designed by my partner Natalie Downe, actually have a labelled “notes” area on one side of them.
[... 98 words]Is it probable that one of the major forum software packages will support Ajax soon?
Those codebases are all terrifyingly ancient. I suggest taking a look at http://www.discourse.org/ instead which is a much more modern take on forum software.
[... 46 words]How do you become a good programmer?
In my experience new programmers progress a LOT faster if they’re learning with a higher level dynamic language such as Python or Ruby than if they only use C++ or Java. That’s not to say it isn’t a good idea to learn Java/C++ (though I’d encourage you to learn C as a lower-level language) but you may find you pick up programming concepts a whole bunch faster with a language that has a good interactive prompt.
[... 126 words]Y Combinator Demo Day and Class of Summer 2013: Is it true that YC alumni are participating in the primary selection process during S13?
Yes—this has been happening for a few years now. Here’s Paul Graham’s announcement about it back in October 2009: Announcement: YC alumni will help us read applications
[... 60 words]What advice would Simon Willison give to a beginner Python/Django developer?
Build something and put it on the internet. Make sure you have an easy way to deploy new versions (Heroku is a good bet if you don’t want to figure out Fabric). Pick a project that’s useful to you—a simple blogging engine is often a good bet, or maybe something that aggregates together your posts from Twitter and Instagram and so on. Or come up with something a bit more creative!
[... 109 words]What are some recommended efficient apps for personal productivity (e.g., setting & receiving reminders for completing tasks)?
Things is excellent (at least if you are a Mac/iPhone person)—intuitive, powerful and with flawless syncing. Only catch is it’s a tad expensive considering you have to buy the iPhone and Mac apps separately.
[... 59 words]What is the inital costs for a tech startup? Do you have any checklist or spreadsheet?
Initial costs can be incredibly low—a few bucks for a domain name, $40/month or so for VPS hosting. Things only start to get expensive when either you need to scale up to multiple servers (which means you’re doing well) or when you start to pay salaries.
[... 70 words]How is Web engineering related to Software engineering?
I’d describe it as a subset of software engineering that deals with issues relating to the web—web application development, web protocols, browsers and so on.
[... 41 words]What are the design mistakes in the Meteor framework?
Treating the non-JavaScript case as unimportant.
[... 21 words]In which programming language do programmers get paid the most?
The best (and best paid) software engineers work in multiple languages, and pick new ones up as and when they need to. If you pigeon-hole yourself as an “X programmer” you’ll limit yourself to relatively uninteresting, interchangeable roles.
[... 54 words]What are some good analytics software for SAAS products? wrt to customer churn, segmentation of customers and product metrics
The two big ones at the moment are www.kissmetrics.com and www.mixpanel.com. They are both excellent, and both offer free trials... do I suggest giving both of them a go and seeing which one you find most useful.
[... 64 words]How does a web page interact with a server to parse a dynamic JSON file?
If you’re only dealing with 60 records there’s no need to add a full database. I’ve actually hand coded a 50 record JSON file before and it was fine- use an editor with good JSON support (I like Sublime Text 2) and it’s pretty easy to hand write.
[... 103 words]What are useful tools for building out web app Infrastructure?
First, make sure you know your way around a command automation tool, such as Fabric (Python) or Capistrano (Ruby).
[... 63 words]How can you assign routes for a website in a .net environment?
You’ll have a much easier time of it if you use paths that start at the root rather than relative paths, eg <a href="/foo/bar/"> instead of <a href="../bar/">
[... 46 words]Why does Python not have any data structures that store data in sorted order?
The bisect module provides functions for achieving this using a python list as the underlying data structure: http://docs.python.org/2/library...
[... 39 words]If I write a blog, then use the same information to create a slideshare presentation, will that help or hurt my website’s SEO?
I would be absolutely amazed if you were hit by a duplicate content penalty for this. To a search engine spider (even a super advanced one) content formatted as a blog post and similar content repurposed as slides will look completely different.
[... 71 words]What do you offer to a high-profile speaker when inviting him to an event?
Unless they live locally it’s almost rude not to offer flights and accommodation—they will certainly expect it.
[... 134 words]Where can I get Korean alcoholic soju yoghurt in London?
We found somewhere! Han Kang near Tottenham Court Road https://plus.google.com/10738855...
[... 27 words]What books are there for living a life as an startup entrepreneur? Giving up a job and then find a mentor, Brainstorming ideas, locating seed money. Hire Programmers. Have I got this right?
Read The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—see also http://theleanstartup.com/
[... 60 words]Does anybody get mad at the moderators here at Quora?
I get annoyed with question redirects sometimes. When I answer a question I try to take in to account the exact specifics and exact context of the question, which are usually obliterated by a merge with a similar but not semantically identical question.
[... 59 words]What is the best way to deploy Django?
These days a popular and reliable method is to run gunicorn behind nginx. This tutorial includes notes on using upstart for process management which is handy if you are on Ubuntu: http://lincolnloop.com/django-be...
[... 47 words]What is the relationship between CTO and VP of Engineering typically like?
There was a great talk about this topic last year by the CTO and VP Engineering if Joyent at the Monkigras conference in London—slides and video available here: http://lanyrd.com/2012/monkigras...
[... 50 words]Will people pay $25 to see a blockbuster-type movie?
Here in London my closest cinema is charging £17.45 for an adult ticket to see Man of Steel in 3D, which is equivalent to $27.55. I’ve paid the same to see Star Trek Into Darkness recently.
[... 51 words]Do Flask and Django have a GUI interface like web2py?
No. The web2py GUI is something of an oddity in the Python world.
[... 65 words]Where can I find an updated DB of countries, states and cities?
This is a surprisingly complicated question. The first thing you might want to ask yourself is “what’s a country”—how do you deal with places on this List of states with limited recognition for example?
[... 182 words]What’s the best platform I can use for a food delivery startup? Shopify? Or should I instead learn to code?
Don’t build an e-commerce system as your first programming project—I know engineers with many years of experience who wouldn’t trust themselves to write code that handles money.
[... 103 words]How do some public speakers memorize so many statistics when speaking on stage?
It’s really not hard. If you’re memorising a complete speech, remembering a few statistics is easy in comparison. Also, the stats you use in a speech should be meaningful (otherwise thy include them at all?) which means the have a built in mnemonic.
[... 62 words]What is the best conference welcome video you’ve ever seen?
Webstock always have awesome opening titles. Here’s their 2013 one: Webstock ’13 opening—it’s worth hunting around for previous years as well.
[... 40 words]Who was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 batch?
You are unlikely to get any good answers to this question for a while, because YC startups are advised not to announce their participation straight away. Instead, they usually hold the announcement until they are ready to launch something—it’s a useful hook for getting extra coverage for the story.
[... 79 words]