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Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

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101–110 of 155 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#101

Jekyll ( https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll ) First touched it two months ago just to tinker with but didn't really do anything with it. Then after numerous frustrations with my current blogging setup, I spent the last 5 days hacking on it over the holidays and I think it's almost ready to launch. Had to do some custom stuff that I'll write about in a post. It's extremely hackable and I love it. The only thing that do…

Is there any reason you couldn't have just had Wordpress generate HTML that you then statically cached?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#102

Jekyll ( https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll ) First touched it two months ago just to tinker with but didn't really do anything with it. Then after numerous frustrations with my current blogging setup, I spent the last 5 days hacking on it over the holidays and I think it's almost ready to launch. Had to do some custom stuff that I'll write about in a post. It's extremely hackable and I love it. The only thing that do…

Is there any reason you couldn't have just had Wordpress generate HTML that you then statically cached?

I wanted to learn something new. That's probably the only reason I went with Jekyll. :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#103
post #10

makerbot cupcake cnc. It was an on again off again sort of project mostly off, but i finished it up a week or two ago. Now I can print plastic in any shape i can draw in art of illusion. It's satisfying fiddling at the computer for a while then printing and having a real 3d thing.

What's some stuff you've printed?

mostly just silly calibration cubes. a few space invaders and companion cubes to give to friends. today i (continued) work on a spindle to hold the big spool of plastic.

cnc is so much fun. I think i'm going to have to get a cnc mill. this is just to tempting. http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/guerrilla_cnc1.shtml

In the near term i'll probably just print some brackets and containers for stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#104
post #18
post #15

Twilio. Ringing phones is pure magic, and provides so many disruptive opportunities it is staggering.

+1 for Twilio. Tropo is looking pretty sweet too.

Indeed; especially their PhonoSDK. http://phono.com/ I didn't really understand what it did until I listened to this podcast: http://changelogshow.com/105/18576-episode-0-4-1-telephony-w...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#108
This post made my day. I've found some new interesting stuff from the comments. Thank you.

2010 was a year of discoveries for me. I started learning and using technologies like Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, HAML, Google Maps API v3. I started reading HN. Just in the end of the year I've discovered that with technologies like Rhodes framework, Appcelerator or Phonegap I can create iPhone/Android applications with HTML/Javascript or Ruby without knowing objective C. And this is just the most recent excitement I got.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason you couldn't have just had Wordpress generate HTML that you then statically cached?

I wanted to learn something new. That's probably the only reason I went with Jekyll. :)

That's reasonable :) I love Jekyll, so I have no objection to you switching. Just pointing out that there were probably much faster ways to get the same speedup.

Feel free to email me if you need any help getting the last bits figured out. I use jekyll for blog.danieljackoway.com and danieljackoway.com, and I've done some weird stuff with it (like pages that are generated purely through the layout + YAML frontmatter--no "content"). Plus I'd just like to see the redesign early :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#110
post #74

Varnish, the reverse proxy, has been my favorite new-to-me technology of 2010. It sits in front of Apache and caches static content (or anything really) based on rules you define in the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Varnish is cool because it is very fast. It was written by Poul-Henning Kamp, who has a lot of experience in FreeBSD kernel development. He makes effective use of virtual memory, is careful to avo…

But despite all that description, all my deployments have been one-liners with 3-4 cmdline params only. It really adds near-zero deployment cost.

Squid can do what varnish does, but it's 2x slower by my measurements, and it has a gigantic config file. (Squid can do things that varnish can't, so you may have to use it anyway.)

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