Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Writing code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users [https://blog.codinghorror.com/shipping-isnt-enough/], and creating applications that people actually want to use [https://blog.codinghorror.com/youll-never-have-enough-cheese/] — now that's the hard stuff. I've been a long time fan
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
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
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
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
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
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&
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
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
I can't believe it's been almost two and a half years since I built my last PC. I originally documented that process in a series of posts: * Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot * Building a PC, Part II: Burn in * Building a PC, Part III:
You may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss. Here's what happened: 1. The server experienced routine hard drive failure. 2.
I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat "elevator pitch" tells us nothing