Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged startups in Nov, 2010

Filters: Year: 2010 × Month: Nov × startups × Sorted by date


What are the differences between GDC and SXSW? Which one is better for a web entrepreneur?

I haven’t been to GDC, but it’s a game development conference. SxSW interactive is almost entirely web stuff, so it would be a better fit for a web entrepreneur.

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Why is Java perceived as not cool for startups? We seem to be getting a lot of feedback lately that a startup should be using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, etc., if they want to be agile and iterate quickly.

You should re-evaluate your beliefs. Dynamic language programmers spend a great deal of time thinking about code quality and maintainability. TDD (and BDD), which I believe was first popularised within the Ruby community) are extremely widespread, and profiling and debugging tools are widely used and constantly improved. A strong test suite provides far more effective protection against bugs than static typing and an IDE.

[... 152 words]

What are some good book discovery and recommendation sites?

I really like http://readernaut.com/—here’s an example profile: http://readernaut.com/nathan/

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Would you recommend using Google Go with web.go, or Node.js for a new web server project which will involve high IO?

If you already know JavaScript, picking up Node.js is pretty easy. It also has a much larger community of web developers around it at the moment than web.go, which means there’s more example code / open source bits and pieces floating around.

[... 69 words]