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What are optimal workflows for deploying one’s web application?
The absolute first step is to automate your deployments. It’s absolutely crucial that deploying the site is a single command. I’ve found Fabric (an automation tool written in Python) works extremely well for this—Capistrano is a popular alternative that uses Ruby instead.
[... 360 words]If you were to build homeaway or vrbo from scratch, which software would you use?
HomeAway and VRBO are user-submitted content marketplaces, not traditional content management systems—using a CMS such as Drupal or Joomla would in my opinion be a mistake, as you’ll find yourself spending most of your time writing custom code. The benefits of a CMS will mostly be irrelevant for this application, and you’ll spend a bunch of time coding around their limitations and disabling default functionality that doesn’t fit your purposes.
[... 139 words]Why doesn’t Google Chrome use the Google Search Engine spellchecker?
Because the Google search spellchecker runs in their data centers, while the Chrome spellchecker runs on your local machine. Sending everything you type in to your browser to Google’s servers just to check spelling would be an unnecessary privacy violation, especially since local spell checking does a good-enough job.
[... 65 words]Play Framework, Django or Rails? Which one do you recommend for Social Networking Web applications.
Both Rails and Django have been used for a large number of high profile social networking web applications. Off the top of my head, Django is used by Instagram and Pinterest, Rails is used by Posterous and Ravelry. I don’t know what the largest sites built using Play are at the moment.
[... 149 words]What is a good programming language to learn after bash scripting?
Python is a good natural progression from bash in my opinion. It has an interactive prompt which supports bash-style exploratory programming, and it has libraries that mean it can be applied to an enormous range of problems—everything from game development to scientific computing to web applications.
[... 65 words]What are the best events search engines?
Since I co-founded one I’m certainly not qualified to express an opinion on which ones are best, but here are a few of my favourites:
[... 233 words]What is a Twitter alternative for internal teams?
Yammer is the most obvious tool here.
[... 78 words]Where are the best places to go in London on a weekend for free?
Just walk. One of the joys of London is that any walk you take is guaranteed to turn up interesting architecture and surprises. I once spent an afternoon walking from Paddington to Tate Modern and saw loads of fascinating places that I had no idea were there. Use Google maps and look out for interesting looking squares, parks and back streets. These days I also tend to pop open Foursquare’s “Explore” tab every now and then to see if I’m walking near something particularly interesting.
[... 105 words]How could Sherlock be improved?
Watson needs to be more competent. Jude Law’s Watson is significantly more useful than Martin Freeman’s—Watson is a military man and a doctor, and is hence useful for far more than just bumbling around with a quizzical expression and updating his blog.
[... 92 words]What are the pros and cons of using Drupal as a web application framework?
The short answer: Drupal is a content management system that has slowly evolved in to a framework. This means that it comes with an enormous amount of functionality for free, but that’s also a huge amount of stuff that you have to understand and potentially work around as your custom requirements get more involved.
[... 95 words]Benchmarks for scalability in NoSQL systems?
NoSQL systems are enormously varied which makes it hard (and not particularly constructive) to benchmark them against each other. How would you compare the performance of Redis, an in-memory data structure server, with Cassandra, a distributed redundant column store?
[... 78 words]Mobile World Congress: Is it worth going?
It depends on what you want to get out of it. I haven’t been myself, but from what I’ve heard MWC is the Mobile world’s equivalent of something like SXSW—huge (49,000+ people), sprawling, bewildering and full of everyone you could possibly want to meet from the mobile world.
[... 75 words]Companies like Wipro (Indian company), Infosys (company), Capgemini uses Java, .Net for developing web and desktop application. But I haven’t seen any consulting company of their size using Python. Is there any python consulting company of size 1000...
ThoughtWorks do a lot of projects in Ruby and some in Python. Their website says they now have 1700 people.
[... 65 words]Is it common for founding engineers at startups to buy software and memory out-of-pocket?
Absolutely not, provided the laptop etc belongs to the company and isn’t considered a gift to you.
[... 37 words]What server do I need to handle 1000+ users simultaneously while they can post messages, upload pictures, and other similar stuff on a website based on PHP and mySQL?
You don’t need to handle 1,000 users simultaneously: you need to build something and ship it and start the process of discovering what you can build that will attract that many users. Seriously: don’t even start worrying about that kind of scale until you know you’re going to need it.
[... 138 words]Are there any good Django video tutorials?
ShowMeDo has 55 video screencasts covering all sorts of aspects of Django development: http://showmedo.com/videotutoria...
[... 56 words]Why is Google indexing & displaying www1 versions of my site and how might I stop this?
You should stop serving your site to the public on multiple subdomains. Configure your site to serve a 301 permanent redirect from www1-www4 to the equivalent page on www—also, make sure that your site accessed without the www redirects to the right place as well.
[... 269 words]How does Linkedin use Node.js?
They use it for the backed for their mobile app. Here’s an article with more information: http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/1...
[... 29 words]Is it true that Ruby is more deployment friendly than Python?
He’s incorrect (or at least out of date). Most professional python programmers that I know of use virtualenv, which makes it easy for deployed Python code to live in its own environment with its own set of modules installed separately from the core system packages.
[... 106 words]What are the best SEO conferences around Cincinnati?
It doesn’t look like there are many (any?) SEO events in Cincinnati, but Chicago has has SES in November 2012: http://sesconference.com/chicago/
[... 36 words]What kind of publicly available search software is able to be purchased or used freely as part of a website, and how good is it?
There are plenty of good open source options—Solr is currently my favourite. It’s extremely powerful but you do need to do some programming on top of it—I use Django and Haystack to build the search UI on most of my projects.
[... 115 words]Is there an open-content alternative to Quora?
Stack Overflow releases all of their content under a creative commons license, and even lets people download full database dumps.
[... 33 words]What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google?
It was written in Python—I don’t think they used any particular framework (they started the site in 2005).
[... 37 words]Which tech startups in London have been funded in 2011?
We (Lanyrd) raised our seed round in 2011—we’re based near Old Street.
[... 32 words]Is Django on its way out?
Not as far as I can tell—but then like many (most?) other Django users I’m too busy using it to build things to worry too much about whether or not it’s fashionable.
[... 46 words]Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML?
Yes, there is quite a significant impact on first-load performance. The browser has to pull down all of the linked scripts before it can display any content—if you’re using a library like jquery that’s a sizeable chuck of code that has to be loaded and executed just on its own.
[... 152 words]What are the best tech community event sites in San Francisco?
We have a large and growing community-maintained list of mostly-tech events in San Francisco here:
[... 85 words]Has anyone implemented a message queue with mysql and many workers?
Flickr built their own message queue on top of MySQL: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008...
[... 29 words]