Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
ide
In VB.NET vs C#, round two, I realized that choice of IDE has a far bigger impact on productivity than which language you choose. Lately I’ve started to think the relationship between language and IDE is even more profound: the future of programming languages isn’t a language
regex
Jan Goyvaerts released a new version of RegexBuddy today. I’ve talked about this tool before – it’s easily the best Regex tool available. Some feature highlights for this version are: * Built in GREP tool * Visual regular expression debugging support * Full unicode support The GREP tool is an unexpected bonus;
remote controls
Alex Gorbatchev posted his very favorable review of the Harmony H659 universal remote: This weekend I made one of the best purchases ever and I’m not exaggerating. Up until now I have been in the remote hell. Let me describe my living room setup: TV, DVD, Receiver, PVR and
storage
Hard disk space, like CPU speed, isn’t increasing as fast as it used to: Still, 400gb drives can be had, and it’s not difficult to build a terabyte array if you need to. Which begs the question – where does all that hard drive space go? Two tools I
programming languages
It’s easy to get caught up in the “newer is better” mindset of software development and forget that ideas are more important than code. Not everything we do is obsolete in four years. The Evolution of Forth, which outlines Charles Moore’s guiding principles in creating and implementing the
software development concepts
Do you have coworkers whose shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of pounds of technical books? I do. And I always try to gently convince them that maybe they should buy books by content instead of weight: It took me a while, but I finally came to realize that
namespaces
Jon Galloway recently pointed out something that’s been bothering me for a while: I’m happy to see the huge growth of community contributed code – things like RSS.NET, sharpziplib, ftp classes to tide us over ’til .NET 2.0, etc. But one thing that bothers me is the
software development concepts
Jack Black, in the DVD extras for School of Rock, had this to say in an interview: I had to learn how to play electric guitar a little bit because all I play is acoustic guitar. And I’m still not very good at electric guitar. And the truth is,
design
The appeal of the Mac Mini is totally lost on me. It’s an underpowered, expensive box – like every other computer Apple has ever introduced. And yet, a certain contingent of PC users are buying this thing on release day. I never understood that. Ed Stroglio may be the best
performance
In my previous entry on the real cost of performance, there were some complaints that my code’s slow and it sucks. If I had a nickel every time someone told me that, I could have retired years ago. Let’s take a look at the specific complaint that the
user experience
You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He’s no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman dream team. He also maintains a website with the 10 most wanted UI design bugs: 1. Power failure crash
software development concepts
How can you tell experienced programmers from beginners? New programmers think if they work hard, they might succeed. Experienced programmers know that if they work really hard, they might not fail. Allow me to elaborate with an excerpt from an interview with Steve McConnell: SM: One of the points I