Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
css
We’re currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type exercise on our family of Q&A websites, which I affectionately refer to as “the Trilogy”: * Server Fault * Super User * Stack Overflow * Meta Stack Overflow (In case you were wondering, yes, meta is the Star Wars Holiday
ruby
I have what I would charitably describe as a hate-hate relationship with email. I desperately try to avoid sending email, not just for myself, but also in the code I write. Despite my misgivings, email is the cockroach of communication mediums: you just can’t kill it. Email is the
programming languages
As far as I’m concerned, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen space. By “screen,” I mean not just large monitors, but multiple large monitors. I’ve been evangelizing multiple monitors since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition: * Multiple Monitors and Productivity
usability
Writing code? That’s the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use – now that’s the hard stuff. I’ve been a long time fan of Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. Not just because it’
usability
If you’ve ever wrangled a user interface, you’ve probably heard of Fitts’ Law. It’s pretty simple – the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts’ Law,
linq
While I may have mixed emotions toward LINQ to SQL, we’ve had great success with it on Stack Overflow. That’s why I was surprised to read the following: If you are building an ASP.NET web application that’s going to get thousands of hits per hour, the
programming languages
I find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can’t program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin: The article Why Can’t Programmers... Program? changed the way I did interviews.
programming languages
I apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way: 1. Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn’t nearly as sexy as it… uh…
startup
How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much: It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are
newlines
Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can’
laptops
As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla’s excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: The end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please
markdown
I’m a big fan of John Gruber’s Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don’t think anyone’s quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset: Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is