Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
multithreading
Back when I was writing for Tech Report, I had an epiphany: the future of CPU development had to be multiple cores on the same die. Even in 2001, a simple extrapolation of transistor counts versus time bore this out: what the heck are they going to do with those
software development concepts
Brad Wilson pointed out a new, interesting blog yesterday: Spurious Pundit. On managing developers: It’s like you’re asking them to hang a picture for you, but they’ve never done it before. You understand what you need done - the trick is getting them to do it. In
.net
Coming from humble Visual Basic 3.0 beginnings, by way of AmigaBasic, AppleSoft Basic, and Coleco Adam SmartBasic, I didn’t get a lot of exposure to formal programming practice. One of the primary benefits of .NET is that it brings VB programmers into the fold – we’re now real
web design
From the Articles That Unintentionally Parody Themselves department: In the last article we listed some of the seemingly good but superfluous elements with which Web designers clutter their sites. We covered: • Counters • Close, Bookmark and Print this Window links • Flashy menus that don't help the user • Right-click protection
laptop accessories
For all their cool teeny-tiny productiveness, I’ve never been able to effectively use a laptop on... my lap. It’s just not possible, except for brief sessions to check email or the like. To do real work, I have to find a desk or desk-like surface. This can be
retro gaming
When it comes to gifts for geeks, you can’t go wrong with the plug-and-go classic home videogame emulators. Relative obscurities two years ago, they seem to be wildly popular now. Many of the most influential home console videogame systems are now represented at Wal-Mart and Target: * Commodore 64 * Intellivision
user experience
Per Steve Krug’s excellent book, Don’t Make Me Think: We all know happy talk when we see it: it’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we’re about to
software development concepts
If Task Manager Extension is Task Manager on steroids, then Mark Russinovich’s Process Explorer is Task Manager in a ripped anabolic fury, fueled by high octane rage. In other words, it’s extreme: Although it can be a little overwhelming – I think it just kicked sand in my face
programming languages
I stumbled across the Craig Andera post, The Last Configuration Section Handler I’ll Ever Need a few months ago, but I didn’t really understand the implications until I started writing a bunch of configuration section handlers. His approach is very clever; instead of writing a bunch of tedious
vb
It’s an old VB developer trick, but it also works quite well in .NET: to present responsive WinForms interfaces, do most of your heavy lifting in the first Paint event, rather than in the Load event. I’ve seen many naive WinForm developers perform database queries and other heavyweight
xpath
I use Xpath queries about once a year, so of course I completely forget the syntax every time I come back to it. And each time this happens, I somehow find Aaron Skonnard’s very cool web-based interactive Xpath Expression Builder, which lets you hack on Xpath with real time
programming languages
Mike Gunderloy’s book, Coder to Developer, suggests, as part of configuring your IDE, that you explore programming specific fonts. I was intrigued, because I hadn’t ever considered that. I’ve been using Courier New 9 for years. A little searching turned up a few links: * this programming font