Entries in Feb, 2012
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2012 × Month: Feb × Sorted by date
If you missed out on joining to work at Google and Facebook, what should you do?
Remind yourself that there will always be more opportunities, and obsessing over what might have been is a huge waste of your time.
[... 45 words]What is the best NoSQL database to store unstructured data?
Any of the document stores are worth a look—I’d suggest investigating MongoDB, Riak and CouchDB.
[... 33 words]What is an intuitive explanation of Unicode and why a programmer needs to know it?
Check out “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 55 words]How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page?
This can only be done using JavaScript. You use XMLHttpRequest to pull in new information from the server (also known as Ajax—most people use a JavaScript library such as jQuery to handle this) and then use the HTML5 history API, in particular the pushState method, to update the URL.
[... 133 words]Should I take the time to learn programming, or take my idea and run with it?
Stop reading, start building. You’ll progress a LOT faster if you’re solving actual problems and writing real code, rather than spending 5-8 hours a day reading but not practicing.
[... 156 words]Tech Startups: What skills/technologies would the ideal technical co-founder possess?
The most important indicator is: can they ship? Can they prove that they know how to take a project from idea to running code deployed to a server somewhere with actual people interacting with it?
[... 109 words]Which is the best open source tool to populate my database with test data for my load test?
I’ve seen tools that do this, but to be honest it’s very simple to write your own script for this (especially if you’re using an ORM). The other benefit to writing your own script for this is that you’ll have a much better chance of accurately representing your expected data, sizes etc.
[... 221 words]How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs?
I’m going to take an educated guess and say it’s because of unix file system conventions. Early web servers mapped the URL to a path on disk inside the document root—this is still how most static sites work today.
[... 57 words]What tech and/or start up events are you attending at SXSW ’12?
Our unofficial sxsw schedule site currently has 66 sessions with the “startups” topic—you can browse and search them here: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/?topics=s...
[... 85 words]What is the optimal description length in the Apple App Store?
Have you ever come across one if those ugly, long pages advertising an ebook—the ones that bang on for dozens of paragraphs with bullet points, pictures, testimonials, headings, more testimonials, more bullet points and so on?
[... 106 words]What conferences held in the Southeastern US cater to those in dot-com and startup roles?
Here are a few:
[... 104 words]How can I look up Django functions?
You can use the ./manage.py shell command to get a shell which will import any Django modules (or any of your own code) without complaining about the location of the settings.py module. Install IPython first to get a much more useful interactive shell when you run that command.
[... 190 words]What are some good conference directories or calendars other than Lanyrd?
Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/cities/ca/...
[... 93 words]How do I get inside Battersea Power Station?
I think it’s available to hire as a venue—there was a conference there called the PowerOfOne last year.
[... 34 words]What are some places that serve X-Y food in Z?
I found an Indian restaurant in Luxor, Egypt that sold English-style Indian food—it was in an area of town with a bunch of other English restaurants, all run by expats.
[... 53 words]NoSQL: On a shared server, what are the alternatives to using SQL?
You could probably run Redis on a shared server—it doesn’t need to be installed as root, but it does require a process to run all the time which shared hosts may not allow.
[... 138 words]If python dictionaries are inherently orderless, why were they given the name if a real dictionary is sorted by letter?
The metaphor here is that paper dictionaries make it easy to look stuff up by letter or word—just like Python dictionaries make looking something up by key an instant operation.
[... 114 words]How can I parse unquoted JSON with JavaScript?
Unquoted JSON isn’t JSON—the JSON spec requires that strings are quoted (with double quotes, not single quotes).
[... 104 words]Was CoffeeScript invented to help Ruby programmers get over that dirty yucky feeling they get when working in JavaScript?
The original Prototype JS library might fit that description—more than CoffeeScript, at any rate.
[... 41 words]How long until Ruby developers are as cheap as PHP developers? is it already happening? should I still learn it or it only has a couple years left and I’m better off with SSJS?
If you want to be a highly paid engineer, you should worry less about your expertise in a specific language and more about developing broad and deep skills across a wider range of development topics.
[... 197 words]What are the best SXSW blogs?
My co-founder has put together a very useful Twitter list of SXSW blogs and twitterers: https://mobile.twitter.com/lanyr...
[... 45 words]What are the best practices to avoid XSS and SQL Injections attacks (platform agnostic)?
Input validation is, in my opinion, a red herring. Sure—if you ask the user for an integer or date you should make sure they entered one before attempting to save it anywhere or use it for processing, but injection attacks often involve text fields (e.g. names, or comments posted on Quora) and validating those on input is a recipe for banning “Tim O’Reilly” from ever creating a proper profile on your site!
[... 316 words]Why does Google use “Allow” in robots.txt, when the standard seems to be “Disallow?”
The Disallow command prevents search engines from crawling your site.
[... 59 words]Does YCombinator fund Start-ups interested in building electronic gadgets?
YC funded InPulse, who make a watch which talks to your smartphone via bluetooth: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10...
[... 43 words]How important is my alma mater to Ycombinator?
It’s really not that important—it might help a tiny bit to get to the interview, but if you look at the questions on the application form they are much more heavily skewed towards stuff that you have achieved and problems you have solved. The interview itself is almost all about your idea and your team.
[... 90 words]What conferences do business leaders attend to learn about digital strategy?
Unfortunately you’ve just missed one—the iStrategy summit in San Francisco was last week: http://www.istrategyconference.com/
[... 42 words]