Jeff Atwood

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

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Jeff Atwood
Rubber Duck Problem Solving

programming concepts

Rubber Duck Problem Solving

At Stack Exchange, we insist that people who ask questions put some effort into their question, and we're kind of strict 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.

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programming languages

How to Hire a Programmer

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.

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security

Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?

The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you're connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. It&

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meetings

Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

How many meetings did you have today? This week? This month? Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were worthwhile, versus the work that you could have accomplished in that same time. This might lead one to wonder why we even have meetings at all. At GitHub we don&

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programming languages

Farewell Stack Exchange

I am no longer a part of Stack Exchange. I still have much literal and figurative stock in the success of Stack Exchange, of course, but as of March 1st I will no longer be part of the day to day operations of the company, or the Stack Exchange sites,

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Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do

community engagement

Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do

You know how interviewers love asking about your greatest weakness, or the biggest mistake you've ever made? These questions may sound formulaic, maybe even borderline cliche, but be careful when you answer: they are more important than they seem. So when people ask me what our biggest mistake

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design

The One Button Mystique

I enjoy my iPhone, but I can’t quite come to terms with one aspect of its design: Apple’s insistence that there can be only ever be one, and only one, button on the front of the device. I also own a completely buttonless Kindle Fire, and you’ll

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piracy

Defeating SOPA and PIPA Isn't Enough

SOPA and PIPA are two pieces of proposed legislation designed to "stop" Internet piracy… in the most hamfisted way imaginable. As Mitchell Baker explains: Assume there's a corner store in your neighborhood that rents movies. But the movie industry believes that some or even all of

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community management

Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

In November, I delivered the keynote presentation at Øredev [http://oredev.org] 2011. It was the second and probably final presentation in the series I call Building Social Software for the Anti-Social. I've spent almost four years thinking about the Q&A format, and these two presentations

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programming languages

Gifts for Geeks, 2011 Edition

Between founding Stack Overflow (and later, running Stack Exchange) and having a child, I haven't had much time to blog about the holidays for a few years now. The last Gifts for Geeks I did was in 2008. Those recommendations are still as valid as ever, but I

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graphics

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)

Anti-aliasing has an intimidating name, but what it does for our computer displays is rather fundamental. Think of it this way – a line has infinite resolution, but our digital displays do not. So when we “snap” a line to the pixel grid on our display, we can compensate by imagineering

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ergonomics

Bias Lighting

I've talked about computer workstation ergonomics [https://blog.codinghorror.com/computer-workstation-ergonomics/] before, but one topic I didn't address is lighting. We computer geeks like it dark. Really dark. Ideally, we'd be in a cave. A cave … with an internet connection. [http://tuts.pinehead.tv/

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