Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror (Page 24)

html

You’re Doing It Wrong

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>

community collaboration

Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World

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 of effort contributed

keyboard

Have Keyboard, Will Program

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 God’

strings

The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater

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 of math skills talking. In

microsoft

The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

In software circles, dogfooding refers to the practice of using your own products. It was apparently popularized by Microsoft: The idea originated in television commercials for Alpo brand dog food; actor Lorne Greene would tout the benefits of the dog food, and then would say it’s so good that

programming languages

A Scripter at Heart

What’s the difference between a programming language and a scripting language? Is there even a difference at all? Larry Wall’s epic Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities. When you go out to so-called primitive tribes and analyze

open source software

Open Source Software, Self Service Software

Have you ever used those self-service checkout machines at a grocery store or supermarket? What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do. Think about this for a minute. You’re playing the

programming languages

The One Thing Programmers and Musicians Have In Common

In my previous post, a commenter asked this question: So many of the best minds I have met in computing have a love for music. Is it something to do with being able to see beauty in complex numerical systems? I adore music. I have a vast music collection and

programming languages

A Visit With Alan Kay

Alan Kay is one of my computing heroes. All this stuff we do every day as programmers? Kay had a hand in inventing a huge swath of it: Computer scientist Kay was the leader of the group that invented object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, 3D computer graphics, and

web development

The Two Types of Browser Zoom

From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and

c programming

Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog!

In the C programming language, you’re regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. b1 = (double *)malloc(m*sizeof(double)); In modern garbage collected programming languages, life is much simpler; you simply new up whatever object or variable you need. Double[] b1

security

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Mistakes

I don’t usually do news and current events here, but I’m making an exception for the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors list. This one is important, and deserves a wide audience, so I’m repeating it here – along with a brief hand-edited summary of

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