Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
solid state drives
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 full
cloud computing
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 it'
media server
It’s been almost three years since I built my home theater PC. I adore that little machine; it drives all of our family entertainment and serves as a general purpose home media server and streaming box. As I get older, I find that I’m no longer interested in
net neutrality
Although I remain a huge admirer of Lawrence Lessig, I am ashamed to admit that I never fully understood the importance of net neutrality until last week. Mr. Lessig described network neutrality in these urgent terms in 2006: At the center of the debate is the most important public policy
communication skills
I have a confession to make: in a way, I founded Stack Overflow to trick my fellow programmers. Before you trot out the pitchforks and torches, let me explain. Over the last 6 years, I’ve come to believe deeply in the idea that becoming a great programmer has very
web development
It’s easy to forget just how crazy things got during the Web 1.0 bubble in 2000. That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped. There’s plenty of evidence that we’re entering another tech bubble.
hardware
Are you familiar with this quote? 640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody. — Bill Gates It’s amusing, but Bill Gates never actually said that: I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that
Let’s look at where stackoverflow.com traffic came from for the year of 2010. When 88.2% of all traffic for your website comes from a single source, criticizing that single source feels… risky. And perhaps a bit churlish, like looking a gift horse in the mouth, or saying
security
This weekend, the Gawker network was compromised. This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media’s servers were compromised, resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. If you’re a commenter on any of our sites, you probably have several questions. It’
programming
There is a high correlation between “programmer” and “gamer.” One of the first Area 51 sites we launched, based on community demand, was gaming.stackexchange.com. Despite my fundamental skepticism about gaming as a Q&A topic – as expressed on episode 87 of Herding Code – I have to admit
authentication
Back in summer 2008 when we were building Stack Overflow, I chose OpenID logins for reasons documented in Does The World Really Need Yet Another Username and Password: I realize that OpenID is far from an ideal solution. But right now, the one-login-per-website problem is so bad that I am
security
The Firefox add-in Firesheep caused quite an uproar a few weeks ago, and justifiably so. Here’s how it works: * Connect to a public, unencrypted WiFi network. In other words, a WiFi network that doesn’t require a password before you can connect to it. * Install Firefox and the Firesheep