Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
software development concepts
As we begin the private beta for Stack Overflow later this week, I wondered: where do the software terms alpha and beta come from? And why don’t we ever use gamma? Alpha and Beta are the first two characters of the Greek alphabet. Presumably these characters were chosen because
open source
In April I donated $5,000 of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project. It was exciting to be able to inject some of the energy from this blog into the often-neglected .NET open source ecosystem. As I mentioned at the time, I used a
hardware
I got a call from Rob Conery today asking for advice on building his own computer. Rob works for Microsoft, but lives in Hawaii. I’m not sure how he managed that, but being so far from the mothership apparently means he has the flexibility to spec his own PC.
tags: software development concepts
If peppering your code with lots of comments is good, then having zillions of comments in your code must be great, right? Not quite. Excess is one way good comments go bad: '************************************************* ' Name: CopyString ' ' Purpose: This routine copies a string from the source ' string (source)
hardware
In previous posts, I’ve talked about building your own desktop PC, and building your own home theater PC. I’m still very much in love with that little HTPC I built. Not only does it have a modern dual-core CPU, and fantastic high-definition capable integrated video – it’s an
asp.net mvc
As we work with ASP.NET MVC on Stack Overflow, I find myself violently thrust back into the bad old days of tag soup that I remember from my tenure as a classic ASP developer in the late 90s. If you’re not careful bordering on manically fastidious in constructing
php
Robert Miesen sent in this story of a project pathology: I was part of a team writing an web-based job application and screening system (a job kiosk the customer called it) and my team and our customer signed on to implementing this job kiosk using Windows, Apache, PHP5, and the
software development
Some developers love to gold plate their software. There are various shades of... er, gold, I guess, but it’s usually considered wasteful to fritter away time gold plating old code in the face of new features that need to be implemented, or old bugs that could be squashed. Developers
database design
One of the items we’re struggling with now on Stack Overflow is how to maintain near-instantaneous performance levels in a relational database as the amount of data increases. More specifically, how to scale our tagging system. Traditional database design principles tell you that well-designed databases are always normalized, but
c#
Although I love strings, sometimes the String class can break your heart. For example, in C#, there is no String.Left() function. Fair enough; we can roll up our sleeves and write our own function lickety-split: public static string Left(string s, int len) { if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
software development concepts
Ever find yourself clicking on links to music or videos and getting blasted in the face with this delightful little number? That’s right – links to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed
programming languages
As I grow older and wiser even older as a programmer, I’ve found that my personal coding style has trended heavily toward minimalism. I was pleased, then, to find many of the coding conventions I’ve settled on over the last 20 years codified in Spartan programming. No, not