Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I recently read Predictably Irrational. It's a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it's all the more surprising to see how easily we can be manipulated to behave in ways that
Are you familar with happy talk? If you're not sure whether something is happy talk, there's one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying "Blah
The Gamasutra article Dirty Coding Tricks is a fantastic read. One part of it in particular rang true for me. Consider the load of pain I found myself in when working on a conversion of a 3D third person shooter from the PC to the original PlayStation. Now, the PS1
We may kid ourselves into thinking we're writing out of some sense of public good, or to create connections, or contribute some small bit of knowledge to the world. But let's face it. Most of us blog because we're raving egomaniacs. We not only
Do you remember Microsoft Bob? If you do, you probably remember it as an intensely marketed but laughable failure – what some call the "number one flop" at Microsoft. There's no question that Microsoft Bob was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. But that's the
Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming: The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I&
Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-12-28/will-work-for-praise-the-webs-free-labor-economybusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice] describes how many of today's websites are built by the users themselves: > It's dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, an advertising
I'd like to talk to you about ducts. Wait a minute. Strike that. I meant COBOL. The Common Business Oriented Language is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as the language that is everywhere and nowhere at once: As a result, today COBOL is everywhere, yet is largely unheard of
One of the side effects of using the iPhone App store so much is that it's started to fundamentally alter my perception of software pricing. So many excellent iPhone applications are either free, or no more than a few bucks at most. That's below the threshold
As programmers, we regularly work with text encodings. But there's another sort of encoding at work here, one we process so often and so rapidly that it's invisible to us, and we forget about it. I'm talking about visual encoding -- translating the visual
When I started this blog, way back in the dark ages of 2004, the best of the options I had was Movable Type. A Perl and MySQL based blogging platform may seem like an odd choice for a Windows-centric developer like me, but I felt it was the best of
While I haven't been unhappy with Windows Vista, it had a lot of rough edges: This is why the screenshot of the Windows 7 Calculator, although seemingly trivial, is so exciting to me. It's evidence that Microsoft is going to pay attention to the visible parts