Simon Willison’s Weblog

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14 items tagged “technology”

2017

Work process vs technology

Do you have a plan for what happens if you lose your hard drive, or someone steals it? I understand your need for offline access, but personally I’m terrified of losing my laptop to the point that I use cloud backup services (Dropbox, but I’ve used and liked Backblaze in the past) to make absolutely sure that I don’t lose any data should my laptop get lost or stolen.

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2013

What’s an idea worth?

I like Derek Siver’s model proposed here: http://sivers.org/multiply

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What tech conferences will be taking place in Seattle the summer of 2013?

We have a list of upcoming (mostly tech) professional events and conferences in Seattle here: Conferences in Seattle | Conferences & Events | Lanyrd

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What should tech conferences, events and planners do to add diversity?

JSConf did something very clever that helped them get 25% female speakers last year: Beating the Odds—How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012

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2012

Which web startup conferences are there nowadays?

We have a pretty comprehensive list on Lanyrd—the site works like wikipedia, so if there are any we are missing you can sign in and add them to our Startups topic: Startup conferences and events

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What are some major tech conferences that offer student fellowships/discounts?

Many conferences will give you a %100 discount if you offer to help out on the day of the event—it’s always worth asking, especially if you have built up a reputation as a reliable event volunteer.

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Which are the big Tech and Social Media events coming up from September onward (USA & Europe)?

Our site http://lanyrd.com/ is a good bet for answering this type of question. We operate a wikipedia-style index of professional events and conferences, a large portion of which are tech/social media related.

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2011

What are good 2012 Technology Conferences in US for Programmers?

It would help if you were more specific about the kind of programmer you are—there’s a big difference between C++ game developer conferences, Ruby on Rails events, Agile methodology conventions etc. Each developer ecosystem has its own flagship events (for Microsoft developers it’s the BUILD conference, which hasn’t been announced for 2012 yet—for iPhone/Mac developers it’s Apple’s WWDC, Oracle have Oracle OpenWorld, the Rails community has RailsConf, for Django people it’s DjangoCon US and EU, etc).

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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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2010

What are the underlying, unspoken values of TED?

Not unspoken, but the ten commandments they send out to their speakers are pretty interesting: http://www.ted.com/pages/360

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What company had the first API?

They weren’t the first to have an API, but Flickr were the first consumer web site that really pushed the concept in my opinion. They originally promoted it as “you can always get your data back if you want to”, but they then greatly benefited from the ecosystem that grew up around it.

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Aside from Disrupt, what other tech conferences do you track?

Self promoting here (not sure if that’s OK by Quora community standards or not), but the site we just launched, Lanyrd.com, answers this question. It lets you sign in with Twitter and see what events your Twitter friends are tracking, attending or speaking at. It also lets you create a conference profile page—here’s mine, which shows the upcoming conferences I am tracking at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/people/simonw/

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2007

Perl on Rails—Why the BBC Fails at the Internet. Depressing explanation of how the BBC’s decision to outsource its technical infrastructure to Siemens has resulted in severe technology limitations, including the need for everything to run on Perl 5.6 (5.8 came out in 2002). # 3rd December 2007, 9:43 am