Simon Willison’s Weblog

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June 2013

June 1, 2013

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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What are some personalized ways to search for an event?

For conferences and professional events, try out our service http://lanyrd.com/—if you sign in with Twitter (or LinkedIn) we’ll show you events the people you are connected to are speaking at or attending, and we can make further recommendations based on your interest graph if you let us know which topics you are interested in.

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June 3, 2013

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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June 8, 2013

What is the equivalent of E3 in the UK?

Develop in Brighton is a huge event for game developers. GameCity in Nottingham is another important one.

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June 9, 2013

Who was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 batch?

You are unlikely to get any good answers to this question for a while, because YC startups are advised not to announce their participation straight away. Instead, they usually hold the announcement until they are ready to launch something—it’s a useful hook for getting extra coverage for the story.

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June 11, 2013

What is the best conference welcome video you’ve ever seen?

Webstock always have awesome opening titles. Here’s their 2013 one: Webstock ’13 opening—it’s worth hunting around for previous years as well.

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How do some public speakers memorize so many statistics when speaking on stage?

It’s really not hard. If you’re memorising a complete speech, remembering a few statistics is easy in comparison. Also, the stats you use in a speech should be meaningful (otherwise thy include them at all?) which means the have a built in mnemonic.

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What’s the best platform I can use for a food delivery startup? Shopify? Or should I instead learn to code?

Don’t build an e-commerce system as your first programming project—I know engineers with many years of experience who wouldn’t trust themselves to write code that handles money.

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June 13, 2013

Where can I find an updated DB of countries, states and cities?

This is a surprisingly complicated question. The first thing you might want to ask yourself is “what’s a country”—how do you deal with places on this List of states with limited recognition for example?

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June 14, 2013

Do Flask and Django have a GUI interface like web2py?

No. The web2py GUI is something of an oddity in the Python world.

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Will people pay $25 to see a blockbuster-type movie?

Here in London my closest cinema is charging £17.45 for an adult ticket to see Man of Steel in 3D, which is equivalent to $27.55. I’ve paid the same to see Star Trek Into Darkness recently.

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June 15, 2013

What is the relationship between CTO and VP of Engineering typically like?

There was a great talk about this topic last year by the CTO and VP Engineering if Joyent at the Monkigras conference in London—slides and video available here: http://lanyrd.com/2012/monkigras...

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June 16, 2013

What is the best way to deploy Django?

These days a popular and reliable method is to run gunicorn behind nginx. This tutorial includes notes on using upstart for process management which is handy if you are on Ubuntu: http://lincolnloop.com/django-be...

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June 17, 2013

Does anybody get mad at the moderators here at Quora?

I get annoyed with question redirects sometimes. When I answer a question I try to take in to account the exact specifics and exact context of the question, which are usually obliterated by a merge with a similar but not semantically identical question.

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June 19, 2013

What books are there for living a life as an startup entrepreneur? Giving up a job and then find a mentor, Brainstorming ideas, locating seed money. Hire Programmers. Have I got this right?

Read The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—see also http://theleanstartup.com/

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June 20, 2013

Where can I get Korean alcoholic soju yoghurt in London?

We found somewhere! Han Kang near Tottenham Court Road https://plus.google.com/10738855...

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June 24, 2013

What do you offer to a high-profile speaker when inviting him to an event?

Unless they live locally it’s almost rude not to offer flights and accommodation—they will certainly expect it.

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If I write a blog, then use the same information to create a slideshare presentation, will that help or hurt my website’s SEO?

I would be absolutely amazed if you were hit by a duplicate content penalty for this. To a search engine spider (even a super advanced one) content formatted as a blog post and similar content repurposed as slides will look completely different.

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June 25, 2013

Why does Python not have any data structures that store data in sorted order?

The bisect module provides functions for achieving this using a python list as the underlying data structure: http://docs.python.org/2/library...

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June 26, 2013

How can you assign routes for a website in a .net environment?

You’ll have a much easier time of it if you use paths that start at the root rather than relative paths, eg <a href="/foo/bar/"> instead of <a href="../bar/">

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June 27, 2013

What are useful tools for building out web app Infrastructure?

First, make sure you know your way around a command automation tool, such as Fabric (Python) or Capistrano (Ruby).

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2013 » June

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