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What are the best SXSW blogs?
My co-founder has put together a very useful Twitter list of SXSW blogs and twitterers: https://mobile.twitter.com/lanyr...
[... 45 words]What are the best practices to avoid XSS and SQL Injections attacks (platform agnostic)?
Input validation is, in my opinion, a red herring. Sure—if you ask the user for an integer or date you should make sure they entered one before attempting to save it anywhere or use it for processing, but injection attacks often involve text fields (e.g. names, or comments posted on Quora) and validating those on input is a recipe for banning “Tim O’Reilly” from ever creating a proper profile on your site!
[... 316 words]Why does Google use “Allow” in robots.txt, when the standard seems to be “Disallow?”
The Disallow command prevents search engines from crawling your site.
[... 59 words]Does YCombinator fund Start-ups interested in building electronic gadgets?
YC funded InPulse, who make a watch which talks to your smartphone via bluetooth: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10...
[... 43 words]How important is my alma mater to Ycombinator?
It’s really not that important—it might help a tiny bit to get to the interview, but if you look at the questions on the application form they are much more heavily skewed towards stuff that you have achieved and problems you have solved. The interview itself is almost all about your idea and your team.
[... 90 words]What conferences do business leaders attend to learn about digital strategy?
Unfortunately you’ve just missed one—the iStrategy summit in San Francisco was last week: http://www.istrategyconference.com/
[... 42 words]What are XML feed best practices?
It sounds like you’re pretty much screwed already, if you’re dealing with companies that still think FTPing XML around is a sensible thing to do.
[... 364 words]What conferences cover cloud computing and CAD?
We have 36 upcoming cloud computing conferences on Lanyrd here (and 35 videos and 20 slide decks from relevant presentations): http://lanyrd.com/topics/cloud-c...
[... 79 words]How do you find the new URL of a Tumblr that has moved?
One trick that might work is to look up the old tumble in the Google cache or on archive.org, then copy and paste a unique search phrase from that page and run a Google search for:
[... 72 words]Do Twitter API limits rest at the top of the hour or is it floating?
I’m pretty sure they are calculated from the time of the first hit you make to the API—resetting on the hour would likely encourage API users to run large batches of queries at 1 second past the hour, resulting in huge and unwanted traffic spikes.
[... 68 words]Which angels or VCs like to invest in fitness companies?
The easiest way to answer this question is to take a look at existing fitness companies and find out who their investors are. CrunchBase and AngelList are invaluable for this, but many companies also list their investors on their own sites.
[... 57 words]Why is the Zen of Python obfuscated in the “this” module?
I imagine the reason is very simple: Because it’s fun!
[... 27 words]What do you miss out on if not staying in the official hotel for PyCon (or other tech conferences)?
Not a lot really, provided you’re within walking distance of the venue. The official conference hotel for an event like PyCon will likely have a hallway track that continues until the early hours (people hanging out and hacking on things in the hotel lobby) but staying in a different place won’t prevent you from joining in with that.
[... 204 words]Is there a conference for food culture?
There are a bunch of food blogging conferences which might be a good fit. There’s a good list of them here: http://www.namelymarly.com/2012/...—we have a (currently less comprehensive) list on Lanyrd here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/food-bl...
[... 49 words]Do people still write and compile programs from the command line, instead of an IDE? Why or why not?
Being an expert with command line tools gives you super powers.
[... 94 words]Does Facebook’s iPhone app use a proprietary web rendering engine instead of UIWebView?
I did my first bit of iPhone development recently (building the first version of the Lanyrd iPhone app) and there was one thing that came as a huge surprise: the principle reason that people think native apps are “snappier” or “more responsive” than native ones has nothing to do with the rendering performance of a webview vs a native view (especially on the iPhone 4S which is extremely fast).
[... 274 words]Do Python programmers have a tendency to write their own software instead of contributing? Why?
I think you’ll find that PROGRAMMERS have a tendency to develop their own thing rather than contributing to an existing project. It’s even got its own TLA: NIH (Not Invented Here).
[... 94 words]Where can I find great Java/Scala developers in London?
There are quite a few Scala events in London—here are the ones we know about at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/i...
[... 83 words]What are good ways to design a web application? Do you, for example, begin with a wire-frame of the front-end and work your way back to the database schema? The reverse? Figure out both ends and work towards the center?
I start with a working prototype, which I find I can often knock together in a couple of hours using Django. Having a functional (albeit buggy, ugly and insecure) prototype makes it much easier for me to start to reason about the larger application. There’s not much point in coming up with a comprehensive architecture plan only to find out you’re building the wrong thing!
[... 111 words]What (web) development platform has a low learning curve in terms of development, deployment, scalability, performance, and portability?
Sadly, none if them. Each of the things you list is almost a discipline in its own right, and there aren’t really any shortcuts—you just have to get stuck in and learn about them as and when they become a problem.
[... 67 words]What are examples of consumer web products which had little or no initial traction, but which persisted in their direction and eventually found success?
AirBnb famously just kept going.
[... 35 words]What is the difference between a web server and a web framework?
A “web framework” offers a set of APIs for writing your own custom code in such a way that it can be called via the Web. Usually a framework will deal with common details such as HTTP header parsing, URL routing and so forth.
[... 272 words]Web Performance: What is the best way to measure page load times on different locations of the world?
Google Analytics has a built-in “Site Speed” report with a geographical map that can help with this (under Standard Reporting > CONTENT > Site Speed > Map Overlay).
[... 52 words]Is there a simple way to create a form that asks people to upload a picture and an answer to a question, and then gives me access to that info?
You could build this very easily using http://wufoo.com/—an online form building tool (with a superb interface).
[... 55 words]What are the pros and cons of open sourcing my website’s code?
I’m afraid if you’re expecting to open source your code as a magic bullet to get others to work on improving it for free you are likely to be disappointed.
[... 250 words]As a first timer, what are the best tips while flying business class to get the most value?
Wear something really scruffy, so that when you get up to go to the bathroom the stewards can sniffily tell you “I think you’re in the wrong cabin, Sir”—and you can say “No, actually I’m sitting just over there”.
[... 97 words]Which web frameworks should I focus on to make myself the most well rounded and to be able to solve the most problems as a web application developer/architect?
Being an expert web developer isn’t about which framework you know, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s important that you know how the tools you are using work, so you can fix things when they break—Joel Spolsky’s law of leaky abstractions is a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 260 words]