Simon Willison's Weblog: lanyrd

Is Lanyrd any good?

2013-02-18T14:18:00+00:00

My answer to Is Lanyrd any good? on Quora

For some verticals, we're excellent: we have by far the most comprehensive listing of tech/programming/startup-related conferences anywhere online, curated by our growing community of event enthusiasts. If you're interested in events in those niches it's absolutely worth signing up, trying out our recommendations and subscribing to our email updates.

Here are a few examples of areas we're doing particularly well in:

Social Media conferences - 76 upcoming events
Mobile conferences - 99 upcoming events
Web Development conferences - 89 upcoming events
JavaScript conferences - 73 upcoming events
User Experience (UX) conferences and events - 69 upcoming events
Ruby conferences - 51 upcoming events
iOS conferences and events - 35 upcoming events

(We have way more events in the past for each of these categories, but for the purposes of event recommendation the stuff that hasn't happened yet is obviously more important).

We're growing in other non-tech verticals as well - Library conferences and Skepticism conferences are doing pretty well for example.

Tags: conferences, quora, lanyrd

What are good and easy practices for frequent web deployments?

2013-01-08T10:32:00+00:00

My answer to What are good and easy practices for frequent web deployments? on Quora

At Lanyrd we use a combination of Fabric to drive our deploy scripts, git to get the code on to the servers, puppet for configuration management and Jenkins to run continuous integration tests and provide a "deploy the site" button.

Here are a few important techniques I've learned:

Use symlink switching to keep the previous version of the code around, so you can switch back in the case of problems (that said, we've never actually used this capability - but its nice for atomic deploys as well)
Have your build script rename your static asset files (CSS/JS/etc) to include part of the md5 hash of the file contents in their filename. This means you can upload them to your static host provider (we use S3) before you run a deploy, guaranteeing that freshly deployed templates will point to the right files. It also keeps the older versions around in case you need to roll back.
Having one button that deploys the site is invaluable
Deploys need to be almost "free" in terms of impact on site performance - if it doesn't cost anything to deploy the site people will be freely able to deploy often and push out small fixes, which is good for the health of your codebase
Get new engineers to deploy on the first day! Doing so forces you/them to get a full development and deployment environment up and running for them on day one, which means that they can start doing real work on day two.

Tags: continuous-integration, startups, quora, lanyrd, devops

What is the technology stack behind Lanyrd?

2012-08-18T13:49:00+00:00

My answer to What is the technology stack behind Lanyrd? on Quora

Lanyrd is principally a Django application - we use Django and Python for almost every aspect of the web application itself, as well as the backend for our iPhone application.

We're running on EC2, RDS and S3, and we recently switched from doing our own load balancing with nginx to using Amazon's ELB as well (to help support zero-downtime deploys). We serve cached pages to signed out users using varnish (which also helps with our iCal and Atom feeds).

We make extensive use of Solr - not just for search, but also for our suggested events calendar feature and various other index pages around the site. We also use redis and memcached.

Our offline tasks are managed using celery.

We have some experimental features running on MongoDB and ElasticSearch, but we've been trying to reduce our dependence on those technologies in order to simplify our stack somewhat.

Our deployments are managed using a combination of puppet and Fabric.

We have a colophon listing the technologies we are using, but it needs to be updated a bit (thanks for the reminder!) http://lanyrd.com/colophon/

Tags: quora, lanyrd

How do events get listed on Lanyrd?

2011-12-03T10:18:00+00:00

My answer to How do events get listed on Lanyrd? on Quora

We're not automated - all of our events are added by our community. If we're not listing your event yet, you can sign in with twitter and add it yourself (try http://lanyrd.com/conferences/add )

Tags: quora, lanyrd

If Lanyrd allows anyone to edit conference information, how do you assure users that the information is correct?

2011-07-01T15:17:00+00:00

My answer to If Lanyrd allows anyone to edit conference information, how do you assure users that the information is correct? on Quora

The same way that wikipedia does - by relying on users to fix problems as they spot them. So far this has worked extremely well. We also prominently link to the official conference website so people can check the information themselves if they need to.

Tags: quora, lanyrd

Where can I get a calendar of upcoming tech conferences in South Africa?

2011-05-09T09:56:00+00:00

My answer to Where can I get a calendar of upcoming tech conferences in South Africa? on Quora

Try our list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/south-a...

Tags: conferences, quora, lanyrd

Are all Lanyrd conferences uploaded by users?

2011-05-05T16:24:00+00:00

My answer to Are all Lanyrd conferences uploaded by users? on Quora

Yes - all of Lanyrd's events are added by a regular user of the site.

Tags: quora, lanyrd

How do you pronounce Lanyrd?

2011-05-05T13:57:00+00:00

My answer to How do you pronounce Lanyrd? on Quora

We pronounce it "Lan-yurd" or "Lan-yud".

Tags: quora, lanyrd

Which database engine does Lanyrd use?

2011-04-04T09:20:00+00:00

My answer to Which database engine does Lanyrd use? on Quora

We're on MySQL (InnoDB), using Amazon's RDS. We have enough to worry about without tuning and configuring our own database server.

Tags: quora, lanyrd

Is Lanyrd meant to be tech-industry specific, or is that just a byproduct of the early adopter demographic?

2011-02-15T11:22:00+00:00

My answer to Is Lanyrd meant to be tech-industry specific, or is that just a byproduct of the early adopter demographic? on Quora

We want to cover all sorts of conferences (and user groups, and meetups, and conventions... any event where people get together to share their knowledge). We have a good start on technology because that's where our early adopters are, but we're starting to pick up in a few other categories as well. Here are some of my favourite examples:

Genealogy: http://lanyrd.com/topics/genealogy/
Crime fiction: http://lanyrd.com/topics/crime-f...
Food blogging: http://lanyrd.com/topics/food-bl...

Tags: social-media, quora, lanyrd

Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email

2011-01-28T11:28:00+00:00

Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email

This is the first time I’ve built a custom email subscription feature, and it’s been a very interesting ride. We’re trying to find the right balance between keeping people informed in a timely fashion with useful information while not overloading their inbox with too many messages. You can opt for daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly emails and we’ll try to ensure you only hear about events you haven’t seen before.

Tags: email, lanyrd, recovered

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges

2011-01-13T20:38:00+00:00

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges

We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy.

Tags: badges, caching, cloudfront, javascript, varnish, lanyrd, recovered

Find conferences to speak at with Lanyrd

2010-11-24T02:38:00+00:00

Find conferences to speak at with Lanyrd

We just launched calls for participation on Lanyrd. You can list calls for any conference, browse them by topic, and subscribe to an Atom feed of calls for your area of interest.

Tags: conferences, projects, lanyrd, recovered

How does Lanyrd compare to Plancast?

2010-10-03T13:00:00+00:00

My answer to How does Lanyrd compare to Plancast? on Quora

Plancast is a general purpose event site. They handle concerts, birthday parties, gigs, conferences and so on. They allow you to sign in with Twitter or Facebook, and make use of your social graph from both.

Lanyrd is focused exclusively on conferences and knowledge sharing events - basically anything with at least one speaker. We currently only support Twitter for authentication, for reasons described below.

When you sign in to Lanyrd with Twitter, we pull the list of people you follow on Twitter and show you a calendar of events they are attending, speaking at, organising or tracking.

We've been live for just over a month, but we already have over 2,500 conferences listed - of which 970 are happening in the future.

One of the key features of Lanyrd is that anyone can edit an event (wikipedia style), and that includes adding the list of speakers for that event. Since we currently use Twitter as our identity platform, any speaker who has a Twitter account can be added to an event on Lanyrd. This means people can end up with a Lanyrd profile page without ever signing in to the site themselves. Note that we only do this for people speaking at conferences, since the information that e.g. "timoreilly is speaking at Web 2.0 Expo" is public knowledge. We won't be extending this feature to allow other people to report you as an attendee.

This feature (adding speakers to events) has one huge benefit: if you are following a popular speaker (and the best speakers often have thousands of followers), when you sign in to Lanyrd for the first time we can instantly show you conferences that the people you follow on Twitter are speaking at.

We're a very young site, but we have a lot of additional features planned. Our focus is on adding value before, during and after a conference. Before the conference we'll help you find events to attend (we do this pretty well already). During the conference we plan to help capture and navigate the coverage of the event on Twitter, as it happens. After the event we will collect sessions, slides, write-ups, videos and podcasts relating to that event.

We're also very keen on helping people build up a speaker profile page showing all of the events they have spoken at and the talks they have given. To my observation, most speakers never get around to doing this on their own personal sites. Here's my profile page, for example: http://lanyrd.com/people/simonw/

Tags: calendars, events, quora, plancast, lanyrd

Welcome to Lanyrd | The Lanyrd Blog

2010-09-11T21:32:00+00:00

Welcome to Lanyrd | The Lanyrd Blog

We’ve started a blog for Lanyrd, our social conference directory project. We’re off to a great start: “Lanyrd is now listing 1,508 conferences and 5,167 individual speaker profiles. 5,637 people have signed in to the site and made 13,293 edits to our data.”

Tags: blogging, conferences, projects, lanyrd, recovered

Lanyrd - the social conference directory

2010-08-31T19:41:00+00:00

Lanyrd - the social conference directory

Nat and my new project, launched today and doing pretty well despite some early server hiccups. Sign in with Twitter to see conferences that your friends are speaking at, attending or tracking, then add your own events. We’re particularly keen on helping people build up a detailed profile of their previous talks, so adding older conferences is encouraged.

Tags: conferences, projects, twitter, lanyrd, recovered, natimon