Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
productivity
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 a guy who
programming concepts
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 of these
html
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 programming languages
open source
The book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project is a fantastic reference for anyone involved in a software project – whether you’re running the show or not. In addition to the dead-tree edition, the book is available in an appropriately open source free
networking
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 you
cpu cores
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 dual core
software development
Every software project I’ve ever worked on has accrued technical debt over time: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is
code review
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 programming regime.
security
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 interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples. Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the
software development
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 expert,
design patterns
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 patterns, or too