Simon Willison’s Weblog

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27 items tagged “san-francisco”

2021

If you measure things by foot traffic we [the SFO Museum] are one of the busiest museums in the world. If that is the case we are also one of the busiest museums in the world that no one knows about. Nothing in modern life really prepares you for the idea that a museum should be part of an airport. San Francisco, as I've mentioned, is funny that way.

Aaron Straup Cope

# 1st April 2021, 10:40 pm / san-francisco, aaron-straup-cope, museums

2019

Monarch Bear Grove on Niche Museums (via) Monarch Bear Grove is my favourite hidden corner of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It has stone circles formed from pieces of a Spanish monastery that was exported to the USA by press baron William Randolph Hearst. And there are druids. You should read the whole thing. (I added paragraph breaks for this using datasette-render-markdown—Niche Museums is basically a full-blown blog now.)

# 16th December 2019, 9:19 pm / museums, projects, san-francisco

For the Fairmont, the Tonga Room is an inherited embarrassment, as though it were a local lord whose ancestors captured a repellent goblin and chained him up in the cellar, but the goblin is inexplicably adored by the townsfolk and the children, who sneak the goblin food and treats, and cry when the goblin’s master moves to strike it.

In the Basement of the King

# 28th March 2019, 9:11 pm / tikibar, san-francisco

Generating a commit log for San Francisco’s official list of trees

Visit Generating a commit log for San Francisco's official list of trees

San Francisco has a neat open data portal (as do an increasingly large number of cities these days). For a few years my favourite file on there has been Street Tree List, a list of all 190,000 trees in the city maintained by the Department of Public Works.

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2017

Late night dining near Great American Music Hall

Tommy’s Joynt is a couple of blocks away and is a San Francisco institution—great comfort food, inexpensive, crammed with personality and open late.

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In the Bay Area, we have a collection of fiefdoms. Villages are parading as cities, addressing problems myopically. For example, Brisbane (a city of 5,000 people between San Francisco and SFO) is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons. It’s NIMBY-ism on a broad scale – a regional tragedy of the commons.

Justin Krause

# 27th October 2017, 7:22 pm / san-francisco

San Francisco Recommendations: comics, fashion, food, and more

I’m not a huge comics person, but that said I strongly recommend a trip to Isotope Comics in Hayes Valley on a weekday. Go on a weekday when the owner is running the store. He is incredibly charismatic and positively vibrates with enthusiasm about comics. He also has an incredible collection of toilet seats lining the upper wall of the store, each one illustrated by a famous comic book artist. Make sure to ask him about them.

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2014

What are good event venues to have a 100 person weekend hackathon in San Francisco?

As a general rule, tech companies in San Francisco are very supportive of hackathons and keen to host events. Eventbrite have hosted this kind of event in their office in the past, and I’m certain there are a bunch of other companies with decent spaces that would be worth approaching. Does the hackathon have a specific topic? I suggest approaching companies related to that topic as a starting point.

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2013

For a 2-day developer conference in SF, which two days of the week are best?

It depends on the topic and the audience.

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Is it worth it for an aspiring web developer in NYC to attend the San Francisco Startup Jobs Fair in November? What I mean is what are my chances that a company would be interested in me, allowing that my code skills are up to snuff, if I don’t live ...

Not being in SF already is no problem at all—demand for talented developers is crazy high, so provided you are a great developer the fact you would need to relocate won’t be a barrier.

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Events (leisure): What are the best places in San Francisco for organizing a small meetup?

If it’s a technical event, there are dozens of tech companies with excellent facilities who might be convinced to host the event for free.

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2012

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:

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2011

What Social Media events or conferences are taking place in November 2011 in San Francisco or New York?

There don’t seem to be many “social media” events happening in November—September and October are peak season.

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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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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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Which Bay Area startups are going to SXSW 2011?

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

2010

Where can I find a calendar of upcoming tech events in the San Francisco / Bay area?

Take a look at http://lanyrd.com/places/san-fra...

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Where is a good list of social media events in the San Francisco Bay Area for 2011?

Take a look at http://lanyrd.com/places/san-fra...

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What UX/UI conferences in the SF Bay area are worth attending?

BayCHI is excellent from what I’ve heard: http://www.baychi.org/

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What are the best websites for finding out about events in San Francisco in advance, i.e., before they take place?

PlanCast is your best bet for general events, but if you’re interested in conferences we have a growing list on http://lanyrd.com/places/san-fra...

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2009

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. Enormously entertaining short story about data visualisation and creepy San Francisco bookshops by Robin Sloan.

# 12th June 2009, 6:07 pm / bookshops, robin-sloan, san-francisco, shortstory, visualisation

2008

Freebase Hack Day. I’m finding Freebase increasingly interesting at the moment, and their public hack day on the 8th November in San Francisco looks like it could be a lot of fun. They’ll be previewing Acre, a new server-side JavaScript application platform targeted at building Freebase powered applications. Hit “view source” at the bottom of the hack day site to see what an Acre app looks like.

# 24th October 2008, 12:06 am / acre, events, freebase, hackday, javascript, san-francisco

DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Gooleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.

Robert Lofthouse

# 13th July 2008, 4:50 pm / robert-lofthouse, djangocon, django, python, events, google, googleplex, san-francisco

It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.

Me, on Twitter

# 7th July 2008, 5:14 pm / django, events, djangocon, conferences, san-francisco, twitter

Introducing EveryBlock. EveryBlock launched! Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, Paul Smith and Daniel X. O’Neil’s startup which answers the question, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” Cities covered by the launch are Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

# 23rd January 2008, 9:56 pm / adrian-holovaty, chicago, daniel-x-oneil, django, everyblock, new-york, paul-smith, san-francisco, wilson-miner

Flickr: The Commons. Exciting pilot collaboration with the Library of Congress to release images with “no known copyright restrictions”. The header photo (of a bench) is one of my favourite spots in the world, in Mission Dolores Park, San Francisco.

# 16th January 2008, 9:38 pm / flickr, libraryofcongress, missiondolores, photos, publicdomain, san-francisco, the-commons

2007

Minako Organic Japanese Restaurant. On 18th and Mission in San Francisco. We ate there this evening—the meal took three hours and was worth every minute.

# 19th April 2007, 8:38 am / san-francisco, sushi, yelp