Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Have you ever been to an interview for a programming job where they asked you one of those interview puzzle questions? I have. The one I got was: How much of your favorite brand of soda is consumed in this state? And no, the correct answer is not who cares,
I was struck by the conclusion of Andy Oram's thoughtful piece on the next generation of online forums [http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/developing-an-i.html]. > People who want to learn more about computer technology and solve problems they encounter on their systems currently have a
Back in September 2008, I mentioned that we were spawning a new process. Well, that process arrived today, and its id is Henry Burton Atwood. We're starting him off right with a little light reading. You may recognize this book from Apple's Mac vs PC ad
As a software developer, how do you sharpen your saw? Sharpening the saw is shorthand for anything you do that isn't programming, necessarily, but (theoretically) makes you a better programmer. It's derived from the Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There's
I haven't had the opportunity to talk at all about Google's new Chrome browser yet. Which is a shame, because it's easily the best web browser I've ever used. If it wasn't for the complete and utter lack of an
The performance of any computer is akin to a shell game. The computer performance shell game, also known as "find the bottleneck", is always played between these four resources: * CPU * Disk * Network * Memory At any given moment, your computer is waiting for some operation to complete on one
The web is, to put it charitably, a rather forgiving place. You can feed web browsers almost any sort of HTML markup or JavaScript code and they'll gamely try to make sense of what you've provided, and render it the best they can. In comparison, most
The book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596007590/?tag=codihorr-20] is a fantastic reference for anyone involved in a software project – whether you're running the show or not. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596007590/?tag=codihorr-20]
We sit at the intersection of two trends: 1. Most home networking gear, including routers, has safely transitioned to gigabit ethernet. 2. The generation, storage, and transmission of large high definition video files is becoming commonplace. If that sounds like you, or someone you know, there's one tweak
I've been playing around a bit with file compression again, as we generate some very large backup files daily on Stack Overflow. We're using the latest 64-bit version of 7zip (4.64) on our database server. I'm not a big fan of more than
Every software project I've ever worked on has accrued technical debt [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html] over time: > Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham [http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt] to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing
I am continually amazed how much better my code becomes after I've had a peer look at it. I don't mean a formal review in a meeting room, or making my code open to anonymous public scrutiny on the internet, or some kind of onerous pair