Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and RGMII. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
computer science
Have you ever heard a software engineer refer to a problem as “NP-complete”? That’s fancy computer science jargon shorthand for “incredibly hard”: The most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known; that is, the time required to solve the problem
search engine optimization
If you’ve ever searched for anything, you’ve probably run into stop words. Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes. That is, if you type in a stop word as one of your search terms, the search engine will ignore that word (if
graphics cards
Hello, my name is Jeff Atwood, and I’m an addict. I’m addicted... to video cards. In fact, I’ve been addicted since 1996. Well, maybe a few years earlier than that if you count some of the classic 2D accelerators. But the true fascination didn’t start until
programming
In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I’ve been noticing myself over the last five years: The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing. There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than Strunk
technology trends
My recent post on netbooks reminded me of Alan Kay’s original 1972 Dynabook concept (pdf). We now have some reasons for wanting the DynaBook to exist. Can it be fabricated from currently invented technology in quantities large enough to bring a selling (or renting) price within reach of millions
hci
I like to take one or two books with me when I travel, and one of the books I chose for this trip is HCI Remixed. Sometimes the books I choose are a bust. Fortunately that didn’t happen this time. HCI Remixed covers all the major milestones in the
regex
URLs are simple things. Or so you’d think. Let’s say you wanted to detect an URL in a block of text and convert it into a bona fide hyperlink. No problem, right? Visit my website at http://www.example.com, it’s awesome! To locate the URL in
laptop
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about the emerging “netbook” category of subnotebooks: The term netbook refers to a category of small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient, Internet-centric laptops, generally optimized for Web surfing and e-mailing. Like any self-respecting nerd,
programming languages
Have you ever noticed that blogs are full of misinformation and lies? In particular, I’m referring to this blog. The one you’re reading right now. For example, yesterday’s post was so bad that it is conclusive proof that I’ve jumped the shark. Again. Apparently, according to
marketing
I’m a huge Steve Yegge fan, so It was a great honor to have Steve Yegge on a recent Stack Overflow podcast. One thing I couldn’t have predicted, however, was one particular theme of Steve’s experience at Google and Amazon that kept coming up time and time
programming languages
I’m not a huge fan of The Daily WTF for reasons I’ve previously outlined. There is, however, the occasional gem – such as this one posted by ezrec: Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence: “Apple made the clbuttic mistake
programming languages
A few months ago, Dare Obasanjo noticed a brief exchange my friend Jon Galloway and I had on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter makes it unusually difficult to follow conversations, but Dare outlines the gist of it in Developers, Using Libraries is not a Sign of Weakness: The problem Jeff was trying