Items in 2012
Filters: Year: 2012 × Sorted by date
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]Is there any reason for a new programmer to choose C# over VB.NET (or vice versa)?
My understanding is that VB.NET was mainly created to help make existing Visual Basic programmers more comfortable with the transition to .NET
[... 65 words]Is there a framework that allows me to collect input from individual users, and then charge for the aggregate and analysis of that data?
No—your needs are extremely specific. You’re going to have to build this yourself.
[... 95 words]How to get a Twitter user’s join date?
It’s included in the standard user JSON that comes back with any tweet—or you can hit http://api.twitter.com/1/users/s... and look at the created_at key
[... 40 words]What are some good examples of a first PHP app to build for someone who is learning?
Build a blog. Blog engines are, in my opinion, the ideal starter project for learning any server-side web technology.
[... 172 words]