Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved,
When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 – then known as Stack Overflow – we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included: * Reddit and Digg voting * Xbox 360 achievements * Wikipedia
Perhaps you've seen this recent XKCD about password choice? It prompted a spirited debate – even on our very own Security Stack Exchange – about the merits of the argument presented there. Now, to be clear, I'm completely on Randall's side here; I'm all
I'm not into self-help. I don't buy self-help books, I don't read productivity blogs, and I certainly don't subscribe to self-proclaimed self-help guru newsletters. Reading someone else's advice on the rather generic concept of helping yourself always struck me as
I've had more or less the same PC, with various updates, since 2007. I've written about most of it here: * Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot * Building a PC, Part II: Burn in * Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking * Building a PC, Part IV: Now
We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays,
On my first visit to the Fog Creek Software offices in 2008, I was surprised to see programmers zooming around the office on scooters. I didn't realize that scooters were something geeks would be into, but it sure looked like fun, albeit borderline dangerous fun, on the 25th
For almost eight months after launching Stack Overflow to the public, we had no concept of banning or blocking users. Like any new frontier town in the wilderness of the internet, I suppose it was inevitable that we'd be obliged to build a jail at some point. But
One of the things I like most about Google's Chrome web browser is how often it is updated. But now that Chrome has rocketed through eleven versions in two and a half years, the thrill of seeing that version number increment has largely worn off. It seems they&
The last sound card I purchased was in 2006, and that's only because I'm (occasionally) a bleeding edge PC gamer. The very same card was still in my current PC until a few days ago. It's perhaps too generous to describe PC sound hardware
As an early advocate of solid state hard drives … * The State of Solid State Hard Drives (October 2009) * Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives (October 2010) … I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of
Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called "cloud computing", so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And