Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Lately, I've been seeing these odd little signs pop up in storefronts around town. All the signs have various forms of this printed on them: Only 3 students at a time in the store please We took that picture at a 7-11 convenience store which happens to be
A recent episode of This American Life [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us] interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us] . Groups of four college students were organized into teams
I think I have a problem with authority. Starting with my own. It troubles me greatly to hear that people see me as an expert or an authority, and not a fellow amateur. If I've learned anything in my career, it is that approaching software development as an
A common response to The Ferengi Programmer: From what I can see, the problem of "overly-rule-bound developers" is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem of "developers who don't really have a clue." The majority of developers do not suffer from too much design
There was a little brouhaha recently about some comments Joel Spolsky made on our podcast: Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That's a real easy-to-Google term!) It's object-oriented design, and they're calling
I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference, which describes itself thusly: The way to online success is through being easily found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now
The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse,
In The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater we discussed the performance considerations of building a fragment of HTML. string s = @"<div class=""action-time"">{0}{1}</div> <div class=""gravatar32"">{2}</div> <div
When you visit Wikipedia's entry on asphalt, you get some reasonably reliable information about asphalt. What you don't get, however, is any indication of who the author is. That's because the author is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a community effort, the result of tiny slices
My beloved Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 has succumbed to the relentless pounding of my fingers. A moment of silence, please. OK, it still works, technically, but certain keys have become.. unreliable. In particular, the semicolon key is now infuriatingly difficult to use. I don't know if this is
I'll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a problem that I can't solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that's just my lack
In software circles, dogfooding refers to the practice of using your own products. It was apparently popularized by Microsoft [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food]: > The idea originated in television commercials for Alpo brand dog food; actor Lorne Greene would tout the benefits of the