Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged quora in May

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Why is snapEDA.com slow? Is it because it uses Django?

No, it’s not slow because it uses Django.

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How can I negotiate a free conference venue in London?

The two top options in my experience are universities (including student unions) and private companies with good meeting facilities.

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Are traditional web frameworks and languages like RubyOnRail, Spring Boot and PHP dying now when new fast reactive pure JavaScript frameworks and services like Meteor, Node, Angular 2.0 and Firebase are breaking ground?

No.

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Which London Underground line is the deepest?

The Northern line has both the deepest point below ground (220 feet, at Hampstead) and the deepest below sea level (70 feet, south of Waterloo)

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What are some great Big Data conferences around Dallas Texas?

We have a list of Big Data conferences and events in Texas on Lanyrd—there’s a DFW Big Data meetup which might be a good place to start (they have an event happening on May 15th).

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Why is site search so bad on most websites?

It’s not so much that site search is bad, it’s that your expectations have been raised enormously high by the incredible quality of search provided by search engines like Google.

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What are the best web design and web development conferences/ meetups in Central & Eastern Europe (2013)?

We have a list of Web Design conferences and events in Central and Eastern Europe on Lanyrd—you might find our full list of Conferences in Central and Eastern Europe useful as well.

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What are the best web solutions available for coordinating people you send out for events?

We recently released a product that solves exactly this problem. Lanyrd Pro is designed to help companies that promote themselves through attending, speaking at and sponsoring events co-ordinate their event strategy internally and promote it externally.

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What are some cool and cost-effective things to do for and at a wedding reception?

Lawn games! Croquet, pétanque, coits and the like. Cheap, fun, easy for people to pick up, won’t ruin any suits and (at least for a UK wedding) traditional without being overly cheesey.

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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.

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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...

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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/ ).

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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:

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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.

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How to maximize the conference experience as an attendee?

Talk to people.

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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/

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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.

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What are the best event sites/listings for London?

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/ is a fantastic events listing site for unconventional arty/cultural events—lots of interesting guest lectures, open houses, guided walks etc.

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What are some good ways to promote a “networking event” on the internet ?

Add your event to http://lanyrd.com/ and encourage your attendees to mark themselves as attending. That way, anyone who follows them on Twitter and uses Lanyrd will hear about the event, either directly on the site or via email if they’ve signed up for our email alerts.

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Does Google (company) have their own Audio Visual department for their large conferences, or do they contract another company?

I believe it’s their own in-house team—when we ran the first DjangoCon at Google’s Mountain View HQ a few years ago I understood that the video team were their own (the same team that records their internal Google Tech Talks). It might be an external company that they contract in, but it felt like they were permanent staff.

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When and where was the first An Event Apart held?

We have a list of all 29 An Event Apart conferences here:

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What are the top events for Internet startups in 2011?

We have a bunch of startup / entrepreneurship events listed on Lanyrd—try these pages:

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What are good websites to post online content about an event?

For posting slides from an event, http://www.slideshare.net/ is definitely the most popular. http://scribd.com/ is a good choice too.

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Why does Django still not have support for multiple joins?

I don’t fully understand the question, but if you’re talking about doing a single join across multiple tables the Django ORM handles that just fine. Let’s say you want to get every BlogEntry written by a User who belongs to the Group with the name “admins”:

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What are the main conferences taking place in the US dedicated to Open Source?

We have a list here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/open-so...

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Where can I get a calendar of upcoming tech conferences in South Africa?

Try our list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/south-a...

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What are the best bachelor party ideas (other than strip clubs)?

My bachelor party (we call it a stag night over here) ended in a Karaoke club—one of the ones with private booths. It was awesome.

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Are all Lanyrd conferences uploaded by users?

Yes—all of Lanyrd’s events are added by a regular user of the site.

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How do you pronounce Lanyrd?

We pronounce it “Lan-yurd” or “Lan-yud”.

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