Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items in Apr, 2013

Filters: Year: 2013 × Month: Apr × Sorted by date


What is the best place to post a call for papers in the computer science community?

Our service Lanyrd has a feature to help keep track of conference CFPs. We tend to have more commercial conferences than academic ones, but those topics are definitely relevant to our core audience. For example, our Cloud conferences and events page shows six upcoming CFPs at the moment.

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What are some interesting and unusual tactics to draw people to your booth at a large conference or convention?

Make sure you have people on the stand who know their stuff—ideally people who built the thing you are promoting. Make it worthwhile for people to come and talk to you. Don’t have booth babes who are there for their looks rather than their expertise.

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Which should I learn: Python or PHP?

Python will teach you more about programming than PHP—and you’ll be able to learn PHP easily if you learn Python first.

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What could be the reason my login with Twitter stopped work in web site?

Yes, there have been breaking changes recently. You need to make sure you are running on Twitter’s API v1.1: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api...

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How should I start learning Python?

I’d start by going through the official Python tutorial. It’s really good: The Python Tutorial

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What are the best books/tutorials to begin learning about memcached?

There isn’t really enough of memcached to justify a whole book—it’s a pretty straight-forward API.

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What’s the best material on scalability?

Cal Henderson’s book Building Scalable Websites offers a good grounding.

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What are the simple ways  to gain more self confidence in public speaking?

Be confident that you understand your subject matter. Practice, out loud, in private, as many times as possible. Have notes in your pocket so you know you can fall back on them if you really need to (you probably won’t, but I find knowing they are there helps with nerves). Then get as much speaking experience as you can. BarCamps / Unconferences are a useful place to get started.

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How should one maximize their professional conference experience?

Take a look at How to maximize the conference experience as an attendee?

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