Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Ah, spring. What a wonderful time of year. A time when young programmers' minds turn to thoughts of ... neverending last-man-standing filibuster arguments about code formatting. Naturally. And there is no argument more evergreen than the timeless debate between tabs and spaces. On defaultly-configured Unix systems, and on ancient dumb
When it comes to user interface design, I'm no guru, but I do have one golden rule that I always try to follow: Make the right thing easy to do and the wrong thing awkward to do. The things you want users to do should be straightforward and
Are there any programming jobs you wouldn't take? Not because the jobs didn't pay enough, had poor benefits, or limited upside -- but because the work itself made you uncomfortable? Consider the tale of one freshmeat.net writer [http://freshmeat.net/articles/excessive-code-and-excessive-nudity-what-gives]: > Back in
I'll always remember WordPerfect as the quintessential white text on blue screen application. For a period from about 1985 to 1992, WordPerfect was the most popular word processing program in the world on virtually every computing platform. I remember it well; the very concept of word processing was
I've been following Michael Abrash for more than 10 years now; he's one of my programming heroes. So I was fascinated to discover that Mr. Abrash wrote an article extolling the virtures of Intel's upcoming Larrabee. What's Larrabee? It's a
Have you ever gotten that classic job interview question, "where do you see yourself in five years?" When asked, I'm always mentally transported back to a certain Twisted Sister video from 1984. I want you to tell me – no, better yet, stand up and tell the
One of the more famous Edsger Dijkstra quotes is from his 1972 Turing award lecture, How do we tell truths that might hurt? Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. Note that he specifically
On the internet, you can pretend the world is flat. Whatever country you live in, whatever language you speak, you have the same access to the accumulated knowledge of the world as every other citizen of the planet Earth. And a growing percentage of that knowledge can and should be
Have you ever considered paying for, or sponsoring, a * bug fix * new feature * plugin * small tweak to existing functionality ... for software that you use? I don't mean waiting for a new release of the software, which will contain a bunch of new features you may or may not
I didn't fully understand 37 Signals' advice to Have an Enemy until recently. Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn't be. Figure out your app's enemy and you'll shine a light
I have the very great honor of speaking at this year's EclipseCon with one of my heroes, Clay Shirky. The theme of this year's EclipseCon is collaboration -- so all the talks are presented by two speakers. Our talk, The Social Mind: Designing Like Groups Matter,
I've been a longtime fan of Eric Lippert's blog. And one of my favorite (albeit short-lived) post series was his Five Dollar Words for Programmers. Although I've sometimes been accused of being too wordy, I find that learning the right word to describe something