Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
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…
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
text editors
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-
hardware
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: Overclocking * Building
backups
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. Because of
software development
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 useful. That’
software development concepts
I’ve been unhappy with every single piece of software I’ve ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I’m a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably… problems: * The schedule was too aggressive and too short. We need more time! * We ran into unforeseen technical problems that forced
programming languages
Let’s face it: we all write bad code. But not every programmer does something about the bad code they’re polluting the world with, day in and day out. There’s a whole universe of possibilities: * Follow the instructions on the paint can * Become a software apprentice * Get a
regex
Among programmers of any experience, it is generally regarded as A Bad Ideatm to attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions. How bad of an idea? It apparently drove one Stack Overflow user to the brink of madness: You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can&
programming languages
Ever have one of those days where everything you check into source control is wrong? Also, how exactly is that day is different from any other? But seriously. Code that is visible is code that can be wrong. No surprise there. But did you know that even the code you