Saturday, 27th November 2010
Why is Diaspora built on Ruby on Rails instead of Node.js?
Because Node.js had almost no visibility at all six months ago when Diaspora started. Also, Node.js has only very recently stopped breaking API backwards compatibility on a regular basis. Plus the Ruby library ecosystem is much, much larger than the Node.js ecosystem.
[... 81 words]What is the best software for conference participants?
Our site http://lanyrd.com/ helps you find the Twitter names of speakers and fellow conference attendees, which should make it easier to connect with them.
[... 39 words]What are some things that most hackers used to do themselves but now use other people’s software to do?
Renting co-located servers. These days, most people just use virtual machines for their own personal projects.
[... 41 words]What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django? Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?
At this point, I’d argue that the decision between them comes down to programming language rather than framework—the frameworks have mostly converged on a very similar set of features.
[... 145 words]