Jeff Atwood

Stay Gold, America

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.

The Great Filter Comes For Us All

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don't stop there - read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on

I Fight For The Users

If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment

The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger

Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career [https://blog.codinghorror.com/everything-i-needed-to-know-about-programming-i-learned-from-basic/] . With early computers, you didn't boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers

Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing

Hard to believe that I've had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that's yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster

The Rise of the Electric Scooter

In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-12/electric-vehicle-battery-shrinks-and-so-does-the-total-cost] . If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car

Electric Geek Transportation Systems

I've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT [https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2018/04/

An Exercise Program for the Fat Web

When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now [https://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/] in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.

The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer

When we started Discourse [https://discourse.org] in 2013, our server requirements were high: * 1GB RAM * modern, fast dual core CPU * speedy solid state drive with 20+ GB I'm not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications.

What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here's my 15 second answer: > We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It's called Stack

There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security

Remember "cybersecurity"? Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to? Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world's history. For proof