Simon Willison’s Weblog

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub. Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations.

# 12th February 2010, 1:17 pm / matt-biddulph, socialgraph, recruiting, github

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries. Matt Biddulph collects together some very useful libraries for developers just getting started with Objective-C (though I’m not too keen on the title).

# 27th January 2009, 5:50 pm / matt-biddulph, objectivec, programming, iphone

Silicon Roundabout. Matt Biddulph maps the abundance of interesting startups and tech companies that have popped up around Old Street in London.

# 28th July 2008, 1:36 am / london, startups, matt-biddulph, oldstreet, siliconroundabout

Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment. Dopplr uses Geonames for most geo information, but is now mixing in bounding box data from the Yahoo! Geo web service to improve the default zoom level for their maps. The JSON callback API means no server-side code is required on Dopplr’s end.

# 17th May 2008, 11:35 pm / json, dopplr, geonames, yahoogeo, whereonearth, matt-biddulph, jsonp, javascript, mapping

In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon.

# 23rd October 2007, 10:39 pm / favicon, dopplr, colour, design, md5, hashing, matt-jones, matt-biddulph

identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.

# 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm / identitymatcher, plugins, microformats, matt-biddulph, facebook, gmail, dopplr, openid, portablesocialnetwork, rails, ruby, socialgraph, twitter, fowa, fowa2007

hackdiary: ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote. Matt Biddulph’s ApacheCon keynote, which is basically about having fun with cheap hardware prototyping and starting to build spimes in both physical and virtual worlds.

# 7th May 2007, 9:33 pm / matt-biddulph, spimes, apachecon, slidecast, hardware-hacking

Stemtags is back, thanks to Camping. Nice example of a throw-away single script web app,

# 10th December 2006, 8:51 pm / matt-biddulph, ruby, camping

Holux GPSlim (GR-236) Review. Matt Biddulph has one of these. They’re awesome.

# 7th July 2006, 1:56 pm / gps, matt-biddulph

XML.com: REST on Rails. Matt Biddulph’s Rails mixin provides an instant REST interface to an ActiveRecord model.

# 4th November 2005, 1:47 pm / matt-biddulph, rest, rails

The BBC’s programme catalogue (on Rails). Matt Biddulph’s current project is insanely cool.

# 31st October 2005, 7:39 pm / matt-biddulph, rails, bbc