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Ideas on how to secure good clients for web development? Or—How to turn my skills into decent pay?
Don’t get work through elance—get stuff from your personal network instead. If you don’t have a personal network, start building one!
[... 230 words]Should I attend the Build 2012 conference?
It’s got a great reputation from previous years, and the speakers look really good (definitely more of a design focus, but it’s never a bad idea to get some exposure to people from disciplines related to your own). I’m going, so that’s clearly a vote in favour :)
[... 77 words]What is a more equal-opportunity way to distribute access to a free event that is expected to sell out quickly?
A much better method than releasing all of the tickets at once is to release them in batches—say 50 tickets at a time over three different releases. This greatly reduces the “only people online at the time get a chance” factor by giving people three separate chances to grab their ticket. You can vary the time of day for each batch to make it fairer for people who might be at work / in meetings / having dinner with family at certain times of day (or to take timezones in to account if you expect attendees from far away).
[... 225 words]Are there any website thumbnail services that generate images in real-time?
http://url2png.com/ generates images on demand—you pass the URL directly to the service and it replies with a PNG image. The first load can take a few seconds (depending on how long it takes the originating site to serve up the assets etc) but they cache the generated images so future requests for the same URL will be served instantly.
Where is the best place to go for dinner in Brighton?
Terre a Terre is excellent—it’s vegetarian but don’t let that put you off, it just means they go the extra mile to impress. A tad pricey but great for a special occasion.
[... 51 words]What should I do with a week in Brighton, UK?
Make sure you go inside the Pavilion—it’s marvellous. The outside imitates an Indian temple, but the inside (for some reason) is entirely inspired by China. Both aspects were constructed by British workmen who had never been to either, so it’s a fabulous over-the-top representation of 18th century stereotypes of those countries.
[... 83 words]Is there such thing as a specific multi-site search?
Yes—Blekko does exactly this, with its “slashtags” feature: http://help.blekko.com/index.php...
[... 27 words]How do you know the real size of a web page?
The Google Chrome developer tools can do this, on the Network tab. Take a look at the bottom blue bar (which says “5 requests | 29.49KB transferred”)
[... 51 words]For a first-time visitor but longtime Anglophile, what’s essential to see and do in London?
Don’t spend too much time on the tube. It’s fast and convenient (and a marvellous piece of Victorian engineering) but its often better to walk if your journey is less than three stops. London is a delightful city to walk around, and you’re certain to see all sorts of interesting buildings on a 10 minute walk through any area. Get a data SIM for your phone and use your maps app to avoid getting lost and you’ll have the freedom to explore all kinds of interesting streets that most tourists who stick to the tube for everything completely miss.
[... 120 words]Is there a free/open-source software source code search engine?
If you want to search through actual code in open source projects, GitHub search is fantastic https://github.com/search—e.g. here’s a search for all Ruby code that mentions oauth https://github.com/search?q=oaut...
[... 71 words]Is there a single list of all tech conferences around the world?
We’re trying to compile such a list with our startup, Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/
[... 198 words]What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?
Yes—an index on a varchar column is exactly how you would implement this.
[... 38 words]Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL?
I suggest taking a look at http://embed.ly/—it can take a huge range of URLs and turn them in to JSON metadata. Here’s what it can do with a Wikipedia page: http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj...—and here’s Google Maps URL (not as useful, but still some interesting metadata extracted) http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj...
[... 69 words]How did art.sy get a “.sy” url?
Here’s a generally useful tip: if you’re interested in learning more about ANY top level domain, visit the Wikipedia page for it—which will be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sy in this case (just add the domain, complete with its dot prefix, directly after en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ ).
[... 105 words]Which sites have the best URL design?
GitHub’s URL design is fantastic—it’s a virtually flawless mapping of Git semantics to URL space. Their basic URL structure is excellent, but they also have a bunch of neat URL hacks going on. Here are a few of my favourites:
[... 97 words]When referring to our web site in publications (or Twitter or Facebook), when is it important to provide the full URL—http://www.mywebsite.com and when should you provide just the mywebsite.com?
You have no control over how other publications refer to your site—if you’re lucky, they might spell it correctly and check the link works before publishing (but I wouldn’t bet on it). What you DO have control over is making sure you compensate for any mistakes they make.
[... 166 words]Is there a site which aggregates CFPs (calls for papers/speakers) for tech conferences?
We have a crowdsourced collection of CFPs on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/calls/
[... 80 words]How to prepare for and what (gadgets) to take to Wikimania?
As general conference advice, carrying as little as possible is a very good idea. These days I take an 11 inch MacBook Air, an iPhone and an external battery for the iPhone (thus making it run out at the end of the day as opposed to half way through the afternoon). I only have the MacBook Air in case I’m on support duty and need to fix something—I’d prefer to just have the phone.
[... 150 words]What is the best design conference in the midwest?
If you’re looking for a general UX/web design event, the An Event Apart series are excellent—they tour various American cities including Chicago from August 27-29. http://aneventapart.com/2012/chi...
[... 140 words]Is there a feed or otherwise centralized list of calls for proposals for technical conferences?
We have a crowdsourced index of calls for proposals from (mostly technical) conferences here: http://lanyrd.com/calls/—you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for individual topics, e.g. if you want to hear about PHP conference CFPs you can subscribe to the feed linked to from this page: http://lanyrd.com/topics/php/calls/
[... 72 words]What are some system administration best practices? If someone is running a production web server, what are the basic things they should be doing?
Graph everything. I’m not a good sysadmin, but one thing I’ve learned from working with with good sysadmins is that they spend a bunch of time looking at graphs.
[... 107 words]What separates a CIO, CTO, and VP of engineering?
Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill, CTO and VP Engineering respectively of Joyent, gave an excellent talk on exactly this subject at the Monki Gras conference in London a couple of weeks ago. Their slides plus a video of their talk are available here: http://lanyrd.com/2012/monkigras...
[... 60 words]What is the best travelling iPhone application for a 9 day trip through Europe?
Instapaper is essential—it will let you save any web page for offline access on your iPhone which is fantastic things like Wikipedia and Wikitravel.
[... 65 words]Who is the best conference panel moderator?
Two of the best moderators I’ve seen are Jeffrey Veen and Jeremy Keith, both of whom are regular contributors at SXSW.
[... 103 words]Has JSON pretty much replaced XML for string processing for the web, or are there use cases where XML is still necessary?
It’s replaced XML as the default format for most APIs. XML is still necessary for Atom/RSS feeds and other existing standards built on top of XML. It’s also a better choice than JSON for markup-style data—stuff like XHTML where tags are applied to sequences of characters within larger chunks of text.
[... 81 words]How can I sort a huge amount of numbers?
Sorting large amounts of data is one of the first exercises you’ll see described in any Hadoop or map/reduce tutorial—so I’d suggest taking a look at Hadoop.
[... 44 words]What are the ideal laser pointers for conference presentations?
I’ll swear by the Logitech Cordless Presenter: http://www.gadgetgrid.com/2008/1...—it’s very popular amongst friends of mine who speak frequently as well.
[... 234 words]Is Microsoft’s platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early?
I would argue that the cost of the Microsoft stack is a lot more than just the license fees.
[... 546 words]What’s the best way to learn how to scale web applications?
Read “Building Scalable Websites” by Cal Henderson. It’s a few years old now but still very relevant—it basically covers everything he learnt the hard way scaling Flickr. It’s a really fun read, too.
[... 98 words]