Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I've been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and everything to customers. If
It's only a matter of time until your email gets hacked. Don't believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale. When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up
In the calculus of communication, writing coherent paragraphs that your fellow human beings can comprehend and understand is far more difficult than tapping out a few lines of software code that the interpreter or compiler won't barf on. That's why, when it comes to code, all
I adore words, but let's face it: books suck. More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways: * They are heavy. * They take up too much space. * They have
Hashes are a bit like fingerprints for data. A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion
In Preserving Our Digital Pre-History I nominated Jason Scott to be our generation's digital historian in residence. It looks like a few people must have agreed with me, because in March 2011, he officially became an archivist at the Internet Archive. Jason recently invited me to visit the
In What You Can't See You Can't Get I mentioned in passing how frustrated I was that the state of the art in code editors and IDE has advanced so little since 2003. A number of commenters pointed out the amazing Bret Victor talk Inventing on
What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally [http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/Pagination]. There are plenty of other real world examples [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/16/pagination-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/] in this
I suppose What You See Is What You Get has its place, but as an OCD addled programmer, I have a problem with WYSIWYG as a one size fits all solution. Whether it's invisible white space, or invisible formatting tags, it's been my experience that forcing
What was Microsoft's original mission? In 1975, Gates and Allen form a partnership called Microsoft. Like most startups, Microsoft begins small, but has a huge vision – a computer on every desktop and in every home. The existential crisis facing Microsoft is that they achieved their mission years ago,
At Stack Exchange, we insist that people who ask questions put some effort into their question, and we're kind of jerks about it. That is, when you set out to ask a question, you should … * Describe what's happening in sufficient detail that we can follow along.
There's no magic bullet for hiring programmers. But I can share advice on a few techniques that I've seen work, that I've written about here and personally tried out over the years. 1. First, pass a few simple "Hello World" online tests.