Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

Why Is Forever

In Revenge of the Right Brain, Daniel Pink sees a future where being technologically savvy isn't enough : Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and

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You Gotta Own It

One of the frustrations I've experienced with offshoring projects is the diminished sense of ownership. We're still responsible for the software put in front of the end users, and yet we're not allowed to put our hands on the code. Instead, we draw UML

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Is your PC boring?

The "beige box" PC industry has been slow to capitalize on Apple's proven track record of design. I may not be interested in the Mac Mini, but I sure hope it spurs Taiwanese manufacturers* to produce more interesting looking small form factor PCs designs. And some

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Multiple LCDs

In multiple monitors and productivity, I proposed three LCD panels as the standard developer desktop configuration. The only thing holding us back was price, and the minor inconvenience of obtaining a second video card to drive the third monitor. I recently upgraded my home system to match my work configuration.

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Improved Unhandled Exception behavior in .NET 2.0

I recently posted a question about console apps and AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException -- specifically, why doesn't it work as described in the MSDN documentation? I even filed an official bug report on this. I guess it worked, because Microsoft's Jonathan Keljo was kind enough to explain

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The Floppy Drive Must Die

I'm currently building up my new Pentium M system [http://www.silentpcreview.com/article218-page1.html] for HTPC duties. This means doing a bench (open air) install, clean OS build and Prime95 torture test [http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm] burn in. I also flash the BIOS to the

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Regex use vs. Regex abuse

I'm a huge fan of regular expressions; they're the swiss army knife of web-era development tools. I'm always finding new places to use them [https://blog.codinghorror.com/gettin-greppy-wit-it/] in my code. Although other developers I work with may be uncomfortable with regular expressions

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Beating CAPTCHAs with .NET code

I stumbled across an interesting article outlining how to beat the MSDN visual CAPTCHA algorithm with some .NET code [http://www.mperfect.net/aiCaptcha/]. Unfortunately, the author (a Microsoft MVP) demonstrated his "crack" by testing it on the blogs of other MVPs: > (if you were one of

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A need for speed-- and silence

Wondering which browser is fastest? These guys ran browser speed tests [http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html] across an impressive array of operating systems. The hardware used is mildly obsolete by today's standards-- an 800mhz P3 with 256mb of RAM-- but there's no reason to

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Gettin' Greppy Wit It

We're currently supporting a third party application that, in addition to producing some truly impressive WTFs, generates incredibly verbose log files with zillions of 'error messages' that aren't really errors. This makes diagnosing problems in their server code* very difficult. It is, however, a

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Keyboarding

Like Scott Hanselman, I view the mouse as an optional computer accessory*. Manly coders love the smell of compilation in the morning and we know that speed = keyboard. A mouse? C'mon. That's so teenage girls can pick emoticons in AOL Instant Messenger. And for flash "

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ASP.NET About Box (Page)

I had a request for an ASP.NET version of my windows forms About Box. This is a good idea that I've considered in the past, so I took the time to convert it today: Clicking details will provide a dump of all loaded assemblies in summary form,

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