Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
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
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
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
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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg] was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped. [http://finance.yahoo.com/
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
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
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
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
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
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
As a guy who spends most of his day typing words on a screen, it's hard for me to take touch computing seriously. I love my iPhone 4, and smartphones are the ultimate utility belt item, but attempting to compose any kind of text on the thing is
Do you remember when a router used to be an exotic bit of network kit? Those days are long gone. A router is one of those salt-of-the-earth items now; anyone who pays for an internet connection needs a router, for: 1. NAT and basic hardware firewall protection from internet evildoers