Entries
Filters: Sorted by date
What should everyone know about Oxford?
The Pitt Rivers museum (tucked away at the back of the excellent Natural History museum) is an absolute gem—a proper Indiana Jones style collection of weird and wonderful assorted cultural artefacts tucked in to beautiful cramped old wooden cabinets. Don’t forget to have a look in all of the drawers!
[... 64 words]What conferences has Mark Zuckerberg attended in the past?
It’s by no means comprehensive, but we have a list of 15 events Mark has spoken at on Lanyrd (with videos from 10 of them) http://lanyrd.com/profile/finkd/
[... 42 words]What communities and interest groups in London should software developers get involved in?
The monthly Hacker News London Meetup Group (held near Old Street) is a great opportunity to meet up with entrepreneurial-minded hackers—the talks are usually a good combination of technical and startup/entrepreneur material, and it attracts a really interesting crowd.
[... 61 words]Django (web framework): What is the recommended way to cache objects that are very large (>1.5MB)?
Take a look at redis—it can handle binary strings up to 512 MB and has performance that is similar to memcache. It’s very easy to use from within Django (there’s even a pluggable cache backend for it).
[... 61 words]How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed?
It is your fault. Part of being a good front-end engineer is knowing the ways in which a page might break and working with your team to mitigate them.
[... 138 words]Can you mark items on a website as ’unread’ without cookies?
It’s not very exciting, but CSS will let you set different styles for visited vs unvisited links and the technique has worked reliably since the mid 1990s.
[... 44 words]How should one go about designing a simple web based collaborative text editor?
Take a look at the open source ShareJS library, which implements a bunch of the fundamental (and extremely tricky) algorithms you need to get collaborative editing in the browser to work well: https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/
[... 53 words]How can I keep my website content exclusive?
No, there isn’t—people can always copy things if they really want to, it’s part of the cost of doing business. If you were to publish a book people could always photocopy it.
[... 108 words]How do I get out of being on panel at SXSW?
People drop out of panels all the time—it’s not a big problem, provided you give the organizers a good amount of notice so they can find a suitable replacement. Let the panel organiser know ASAP. Even better: offer to help them find a replacement panelist.
[... 64 words]Any source available to download sample data (in 10+ GB) for testing?
Wikipedia has some pretty interesting dumps, in both XML and SQL format: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/I...
[... 100 words]How can I learn more about server-side technologies?
Get yourself a VPS, set it up from scratch and run some non-critical websites on it (nothing with private user data since you can’t be sure you’ll set it up securely). Both Slicehost and Linode offer a good set of guides to a whole host of common tasks:
[... 109 words]What are some major tech conferences that offer student fellowships/discounts?
Many conferences will give you a %100 discount if you offer to help out on the day of the event—it’s always worth asking, especially if you have built up a reputation as a reliable event volunteer.
[... 54 words]Why are web applications more popular than desktop applications with investors?
How often do you install a new desktop application? How often do you try out a new web application?
[... 36 words]Is it even possible to think of a new idea? Anything that I think of has either been done, or someone is doing it. How do you keep yourself motivated enough to pursue it?
A lot of the time it’s not just about the idea, it’s also about timing. There are plenty of ideas which have failed in the past but could succeed if tried again today. A few things to consider:
[... 180 words]What recommendations are there for conference venues in London for between 50-100 people?
The Magic Circle offer a small, intimate venue with some great history. They are just behind Euston Station. They can seat 150 people. http://themagiccirclevenue.co.uk/
[... 44 words]NoSQL: Whats the simplest on disk key-value storage?
Surprisingly there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to this. Here are a few options:
[... 164 words]What are some fun, interesting things to do or see in the Islington area?
There’s an awesome old post office building hidden behind the Almeida theatre. It’s an enormous, faded and broken multi-storey warehouse taking up a full city block. I’m fascinated by it—it’s such a huge, grand looking building and it’s clearly now deserted. I think there might be a project to turn it in to flats, but it’s absolutely worth taking a peek to catch it in its run-down glory: https://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51...—best place to see it from is Almeida Street (here’s a glimpse of it on streetview, doesn’t really capture how grand it is though: https://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51... )
[... 120 words]What is the scope, as a career, for a Python developer?
Don’t be an “X developer”. You’re selling yourself short if you define yourself by the technology you most frequently use.
[... 169 words]What are the differences between node.js and websockets?
This is like asking “what’s the difference between PHP and HTTP”. Node.js is a technology framework you write code in. WebSockets is a protocol which can be implemented using a technology framework. You can use Node.js to implement the server-side aspect of WebSockets.
[... 57 words]Is it bad practice to have a variable that has the same name as a function?
Yes, it’s definitely not a good idea. In Python functions and variables share the same namespace, so if you create a variable with the same name as a function you won’t be able to call that function.
[... 93 words]How do you convince your employer to pay your way to a conference and justify the cost without being able to show something tangible in return?
There are a few ways to approach this.
[... 210 words]How difficult is to to learn a language framework, like node.js?
The answer varies enormously depending on the language and the framework. Some frameworks are very easy to pick up, others are harder.
[... 162 words]Public Speaking: Where can I find someone to represent me as a speaker?
There are speaker agencies that specialise in this kind of thing, but they’re mainly targeted at larger events which expect to pay $5,000-$50,000 or even higher for speaker. They might not be as well suited to setting you up with gigs at startup events, which are less likely to pay enough money to make it worthwhile for an agent (most agents take a cut of the speaker fee).
[... 104 words]How do you organize the code in your Django project?
For http://lanyrd.com/ our layout looks something like this:
[... 214 words]Are there any good examples of ’large amounts of information being displayed simply and intuitively?’
Much of Edward Tufte’s career has been dedicated to documenting (and inventing) ways of handling these problems—his books are an absolute joy to browse through: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
[... 75 words]What are some fun things to do in Camden Town, London?
Check out Brew Dog http://www.brewdog.com/bars/camden—excellent craft beers and really good (and interesting) burgers.
[... 33 words]What are some creative programs to use for presentations?
Here’s a trick I’ve used with success in the past: set up your Mac to have 9 virtual desktops, then arrange your “slides” on each desktop using a combination of applications. I’ve done this with a title slide in keynote on the first desktop, a text editor with some sample code on the second, a terminal prompt set up for live coding on the third, a browser showing a demo on the fourth and so on. Learn the keyboard commands to switch between desktops and off you go.
[... 169 words]What are the ways to Convert Dynamic JSP pages to a Static HTML to Appear in Google search results?
You don’t have to do anything. You’re misunderstanding how dynamic server-side languages like JSP work.
[... 202 words]What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup?
It’s all about shipping.
[... 251 words]Why is everyone so obsessed with picking faults with Apple’s new maps on the iPhone?
Because this is actually a really big deal. For a lot of people (especially those who live in a big city like London or New York) the maps app is one of the most-used apps on their phone. The new iOS maps are a huge regression, not just in terms of map quality but also in terms of search results. On iOS 6 (at least here in the UK) you can’t even type in a simple address and trust that your phone will show you a pin in the right place.
[... 143 words]