proud n00b

Why do tickets to tech company conferences cost so much? (f8 - $400, WWDC- $1,599)

F8 was just announced, and the tickets are priced at $400 a pop. I don’t know about you guys, but for an individual developer (who would love to go), $400 is crazy money. Why do tech company conferences cost so much?!?

Facebook is charging the people who expand their ecosystem to attend an event which will result in Facebook growing further. This doesn’t make sense to me. I understand they want to cover their costs, but I have personally spent more than $400 of my time digging through their documentation & hacking on their APIs.

Tech events like this should be free. Facebook should want every developer to come to f8 for networking, learning more about the platform, and getting developers’ creative juices flowing. By charging so much, you limit who attends, and therefore directly hinder Facebook’s potential growth as a platform.

Yes this is a bit of ranting and raving, but I think the high costs of these events is a real problem. These events should be free for the people who create more value for these companies. Why don’t they understand that and reciprocate the favor? (Apple I’m also looking at you.)

Are your friends on Housefed?

Since going through that process to get Facebook Oauth2 built into Housefed, I have been really excited about the opportunities it provides.

• User’s having a photo at registration
• Pulling the user’s location
• One click sign-in

However tonight I found another awesome plugin- Facepile.

Facepile lets a visitor see if any of their friends have already connected to your site BEFORE they have connected. All you do is copy the code from that page, paste it in with your APP ID and you are set.

What a cool plugin!

Day 2: Facebook Permissions & Django Battle Royale

Day 2: Spirits were running low. The absurdity of the situation has set in. Now it is just laughable…

Facebook seriously is a pain in the A$$ is to integrate with Django. Yesterday, I got the login to work, but not the permissions. Today, I used django socialregistration, a module another friend has working, and one that worked once for me- until it broke. I had to click the button 10+ times, but it miraculously worked in Safari one single time. Yes- it worked randomly.

If you have any experience with django social registration, please check out the question I posted on Stackoverflow.

At this point, I’m going to take up another friend’s advice and try and figure it out in JS, pull the data in from the client, and store the data they retrieve. 

Hopefully, there won’t be a Day 3 post…

Ask Proudn00b: Adding Fb Connect Oath2 to Django

In preparation for Launch and SxSW, I am integrating Fb Connect to the site. There are two modules you can get pyfacebook & django-facebookconnect that will get you most of the way.

The one bug you’ll run into is how to test the authentication from your local machine. With Facebook, you add your URL in the application settings- that is different from your localhost. To trick it, follow Steve Lacy’s Local development setup for OAuth.

The final piece is adding the right authentication permissions. When the user clicks the connect button, it passes JS:

Does anyone know how to add in the permissions?

Rock-solid Fundamentals

Over the weekend, I saw The Social Network and read this article, The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook, from Hacker News. The impact on me was the importance of ‘rock-solid fundamentals.’

The last few months were frustrating, rewarding, and even community building. With other readers, I learned the basics of Django, GAE, and now have the ability to patch together websites. However in the mad dash to learn ASAP, I did not build a solid comp sci foundation.

Like anything in life, if it is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. I have learned how to code, but when my roommate asked me, “So you can define a class?” I couldn’t.  I know that there is a class within my models & views files, but I can’t answer why. 

””“

After some pleasantries the discussion of technology started and of course a few questions here and there.  What is load exactly?  What does it mean?  Discussions on threads and processes.  How can two processes communicate with one another?  What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale.  I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental. 

””“

Those few sentences from the Facebook interview piece resonated with me. In TheSocialNetwork, guys were hacking away like coding Ferraris- while taking shots. To become an engineer at Facebook or Google, you MUST know the basics, they understand the why.  That is what I need, and what I recommend to other readers.

Gain the fundamentals to understand why.

Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Google Code University