Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me [https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-loving-computers-is-wrong-i-dont-want-to-be-right/]. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously
It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.codinghorror.com+%22video+
We've read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse [https://discourse.org] project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by
When I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-golden-age-of-x86-gaming/], I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. I'm here to report that the future is
Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dirty-truth-about-web-passwords/], you know what the worst is? Password rules. > If we don't solve the password problem for users in my lifetime I am gonna haunt you from beyond the grave as a ghost pic.
There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I've lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I've voted in every presidential election since 1992,
Today's processors contain billions of [https://blog.codinghorror.com/moores-law-in-practical-terms/] heat-generating transistors in an ever shrinking space. The power budget might go from: * 1000 watts on a specialized server * 100 watts on desktops * 30 watts on laptops * 5 watts on tablets * 1 or 2 watts on a phone
I'll admit I was late [https://blog.codinghorror.com/should-all-web-traffic-be-encrypted/] to the HTTPS party. [https://letsencrypt.org] But post Snowden, and particularly after the result of the last election here in the US, it's clear that everything on the web should be encrypted by default. Why?
I've had something of an obsession with digital pinball for years [https://blog.codinghorror.com/pc-pinball-sims/] now. That recently culminated in me buying a Virtuapin Mini [http://virtuapin.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=92]. [http://virtuapin.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&
I don't think we computer geeks appreciate how profoundly the rise of the smartphone, and Facebook, has changed the Internet audience. It's something that really only happened in the last five years, as smartphones and data plans dropped radically in price and became accessible – and addictive
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It's practically a rite of passage [https://blog.codinghorror.com/rediscovering-arcade-nostalgia/]. > I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video
I've been happy with my 2016 HTPC [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2016-htpc-build/], but the situation has changed, largely because of something I mentioned in passing back in November: > The Xbox One and PS4 are effectively plain old PCs [http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/156273-xbox-720-vs-ps4-vs-pc-how-the-hardware-specs-compare] , built on: * Intel