Simon Willison’s Weblog

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1,005 items tagged “quora”

2011

What technical conferences or get togethers take place in London during the summer?

July and August are the quiet season for conferences (since many people are on holiday during those months—the larger events tend to stick to March to June or September to November).

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What is the largest event organizers group on linkedin?

I think the largest group is http://www.linkedin.com/groups?g...—“Event Planning & Event Management”—it has over 35,000 members.

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If Lanyrd allows anyone to edit conference information, how do you assure users that the information is correct?

The same way that wikipedia does—by relying on users to fix problems as they spot them. So far this has worked extremely well. We also prominently link to the official conference website so people can check the information themselves if they need to.

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What tech conferences are upcoming in San Francisco?

We have a pretty good list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/san-fra...

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What are some site/app options for event recommendation/discovery?

Our site http://lanyrd.com/ recommends events (conferences, meetups, expos, guest lectures etc) based on who you follow on Twitter. In my opinion it works extremely well in suggesting events that would be a good fit for you.

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What are the best conferences about startup in 2011 (2nd semester) ?

We have a list of upcoming startup events here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/startups/ ( http://lanyrd.com/topics/startup... lists just the ones in the USA)

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Are any major tech conferences held in San Francisco in August or early September?

Dreamforce (the Salesforce/Cloud computing conference) is pretty huge—30th August to 2nd September: http://www.salesforce.com/dreamf...

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What are some other conferences similar to Velocity?

Surge (28-30 Sept 2011 in Brooklyn) has a very good reputation: http://omniti.com/surge/

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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.

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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Which database engine does Lanyrd use?

We’re on MySQL (InnoDB), using Amazon’s RDS. We have enough to worry about without tuning and configuring our own database server.

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What Y Combinator companies are going to SXSW this year?

Lanyrd (W11) will be there, we’re promoting our SXSW schedule planner / coverage tracker tool: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/

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Which Bay Area startups are going to SXSW 2011?

http://lanyrd.com/ will be there—both myself and Nat.

Where can I find a text corpus of English language personal email on the web?

The Enron email corpus is pretty useful, though I don’t know how “normal” you would consider it.

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Is Lanyrd meant to be tech-industry specific, or is that just a byproduct of the early adopter demographic?

We want to cover all sorts of conferences (and user groups, and meetups, and conventions... any event where people get together to share their knowledge). We have a good start on technology because that’s where our early adopters are, but we’re starting to pick up in a few other categories as well. Here are some of my favourite examples:

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What is the “best” programming language to learn if you want to mockup your own ideas but don’t have a technical background?

I knew a very talented UX designer at Yahoo! who did all of his interactive mockups in PowerPoint—including widgets that you click to transition to another “page” in the interface. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing in Keynote, and OmniGraffle Pro also has tools for creating interactive mockups.

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Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app?

Many to Many tables can be a bit of a pain to deal with using regular SQL, but a good ORM can abstract away any potential complexity almost entirely. I find using the Django ORM means I’m much less likely to shy away from a design that involves a many-to-many relationship because I know it won’t increase the complexity of the application. I imagine the Rails ORM has the same effect.

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Is South the best tool to use when doing database migrations in Django?

Yes. And I say that as an author of another Django migrations tool (dmigrations) which offered a small subset of South’s current functionality.

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What are some good user interface/user experience workshops/conferences coming up this March(p.s. distance isn’t a factor, I’m willingly to travel)?

We have a list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-ex...—the best option in March looks to be Adaptive Path’s MX conference: http://lanyrd.com/2011/mx/ / http://mxconference.com/

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What is it like going through the Y Combinator program?

This essay is pretty comprehensive—it’s what convinced us to apply to YC, and our experience so far has been true to what it describes: http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html

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