Simon Willison's Weblog: matt-biddulph

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub

2010-02-12T13:17:44+00:00

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.

Tags: github, matt-biddulph, recruiting, social-graph

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries

2009-01-27T17:50:04+00:00

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).

Tags: iphone, matt-biddulph, objective-c, programming

Silicon Roundabout

2008-07-28T01:36:05+00:00

Silicon Roundabout

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

Tags: london, matt-biddulph, oldstreet, siliconroundabout, startups

Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment

2008-05-17T23:35:19+00:00

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.

Tags: dopplr, geonames, javascript, json, jsonp, mapping, matt-biddulph, whereonearth, yahoo-geo

In rainbows

2007-10-23T22:39:15+00:00

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.

Tags: colour, design, dopplr, favicons, hashing, matt-biddulph, matt-jones, md5

identity-matcher

2007-10-04T14:53:12+00:00

identity-matcher

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

Tags: dopplr, facebook, fowa, fowa2007, gmail, identitymatcher, matt-biddulph, microformats, openid, plugins, portablesocialnetwork, rails, ruby, social-graph, twitter

hackdiary: ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote

2007-05-07T21:33:47+00:00

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.

Tags: apachecon, hardware-hacking, matt-biddulph, slidecast, spimes

Stemtags is back, thanks to Camping

2006-12-10T20:51:05+00:00

Stemtags is back, thanks to Camping

Nice example of a throw-away single script web app,

Tags: camping, matt-biddulph, ruby

Holux GPSlim (GR-236) Review

2006-07-07T13:56:28+00:00

Holux GPSlim (GR-236) Review

Matt Biddulph has one of these. They’re awesome.

Tags: gps, matt-biddulph

Notes on public speaking

2005-11-24T00:05:10+00:00

I'm pretty inexperienced as a public speaker, but somehow I landed two speaking gigs in as many weeks recently and learnt some useful lessons about presenting in the process.

I gave a talk at d.Construct in Brighton on the 11th, entitled "Ajax and the Flickr API". d.Construct was a Web 2.0 themed conference and you don't get much more Web 2.0 than Web Services and Ajax; as luck would have it, Flickr's Ajax implementation makes use of the site's public web service API to do its magic. The talk I gave described the basics of the API, showed some examples and described the basics of how the Ajax on the site works. The slides are available, as is an MP3 of the talk itself courtesy of Drew McLellan's skilfully compiled d.Construct podcast series.

d.Construct was a great event, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. There are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr; pictures from my talk are here.

The second talk was "An Introduction to Django" at the London Web Frameworks Evening on the 17th (slides here). Unfortunately I was less well prepared for this one, which was a bit of a pain since there were 200 people there (as opposed to 100 for d.Construct)! I felt the slide bit of the talk was adequate but thankfully the demo went down a storm - when you're demonstrating www.lawrence.com it's hard not to put on a good show.

Here's what I learned about giving presentations:

Run through a talk at least once, and preferably more. I ran through the d.Construct talk three times in total, and each time I made substantial changes. The Django talk wasn't finished in time to have a full run through and suffered as a result.
Show, don't tell. The most valuable part of the Flickr talk (according to feedback afterwards) was the demo of the API explorer; the Django talk was completely saved by the demo at the end. Next time I talk about Django I think I'll start with a demo and then discuss how Django was used to build the site.
Never, ever put up a whole slide full of code. Half the audience will be scared off and stop listening; the other half will start trying to decode it and stop listening. Either way you've lost your audience. My Django slides make exactly this mistake. The correct way of presenting code is to do what Matt Biddulph did in his excellent Rails presentation: reveal one line at a time and omit anything that isn't directly relevant.
Have a backup of your slides in a neutral format (I use PDFs exported from Keynote) on a USB thumb drive. It's amazing what can go wrong at the last moment - my VGA-to-DVI dongle failed at the frameworks evening and I had to switch to Matt's laptop minutes before my talk (thanks Matt!).

I really enjoyed both events (both as a speaker and an attendee) and I'm looking forward to future opportunities to be enthusiastic in public.

Tags: dconstruct, django, matt-biddulph, speaking

XML.com: REST on Rails

2005-11-04T13:47:44+00:00

XML.com: REST on Rails

Matt Biddulph’s Rails mixin provides an instant REST interface to an ActiveRecord model.

Tags: matt-biddulph, rails, rest

The BBC's programme catalogue (on Rails)

2005-10-31T19:39:33+00:00

The BBC's programme catalogue (on Rails)

Matt Biddulph’s current project is insanely cool.

Tags: bbc, matt-biddulph, rails