Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
programming languages
I am hardly the world’s best programmer. I’ll be the first to tell you that there are tons of developers out there better than I am. But here's the thing: in the ten years I've been gainfully employed as a so-called professional programmer, I
software development
Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a “wicked” problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it. This paradox implies, essentially, that you have to “solve” the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again to
dynamic typing
The recent release of IronPython .NET, and Microsoft’s subsequent hiring of its creator, got me thinking about typing. There’s a really interesting, albeit old, post on the dubious benefit of strong typing at Bruce Eckel’s blog. Which reminds me how much I hate constantly casting objects via
seo
Philipp Lenssen pointed out that my concept of Unbreakable Links is, unsurprisingly, not a new one. It’s also known as * Memomark * Google URL * Googlenym * Robust Hyperlinks All of these terms really refer to the same thing: using a search engine to build an unique URL. However, there are some
music
The silicon chip inside her head Gets switched to overload. And nobody’s gonna go to school today, She’s going to make them stay at home. And daddy doesn’t understand it, He always said she was as good as gold. And he can see no reason ’Cause there
programming languages
I talked in a previous post about Unbreakable Links – that is, stating every URL in terms of a Google search rather than an absolute address. Great concept, but how do you determine which words on a web page are most likely to generate a unique search result? Well, wonder no
java
I was intrigued when I saw a cryptic reference to “the lackluster RegEx performance in .NET 1.1” on Don Park’s blog. Don referred me to this page, which displays some really crazy benchmark results from a Java regex test class – calling C#’s regex support “20 times slower
c#
The Net.WebClient class doesn’t support HTTP compression, e.g., when you add the Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate header to your request: Dim wc As New Net.WebClient '-- google will not gzip the content if the User-Agent header is missing! wc.Headers.Add("User-Agent", strHttpUserAgent) wc.
network sniffer
I’ve occasionally used network sniffers in the past, but with the rise of REST, XML, SOAP and .NET Remoting in the last year, sniffing has become an essential part of my development toolkit. I’ve evaluated a bunch of network sniffers, including the excellent open-source Ethereal, but the one
urls
I was reading through some of the DataGrid Girl’s oh-so-cute article links, and I encountered a few dead ones. It’s not really Marcie’s fault; dead links are inevitable on any page as it ages. Such is the nature of absolute links. For example, this one: http://msdn.
optimization
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. – Donald Knuth Michael Teper’s blog has a great post about a bread and butter optimization scenario involving string replacement. After implementing three logical alternatives, Mike looks at the benchmark
software development
A friend of mine recently returned the book Showstopper! after an extended loan. If you haven’t heard of this book, allow me to quote the Amazon.com editorial summary: Showstopper! is a vivid account of the creation of Microsoft Windows NT, perhaps the most complex software project ever undertaken.