Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Our kids have reached the age – at ages 4, 4, and 7 respectively – that taking longer trips with them is now possible without everyone losing what's left of their sanity in the process. But we still have the same problem on multiple hour trips, whether it's
Since I started working on Discourse, I spend a lot of time thinking about how software can encourage and nudge people to be more empathetic online. That's why it's troubling to read articles like this one [https://medium.com/@stephaniewittelswachs/the-end-of-empathy-5d8383b066d3]: > My brother’s 32nd
You know what's universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing assembly language code [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language]. As Steve McConnell said back in 1994 [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735619670/?tag=codihorr-20]: > Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than
In 2006, after visiting the Computer History Museum's exhibit on Chess [https://blog.codinghorror.com/chess-computer-v-human/], I opined: > We may have reached an inflection point. The problem space of chess is so astonishingly large that incremental increases in hardware speed and algorithms are unlikely to result in
One of the most common pieces of advice you'll get as a startup is this: > Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure. I've heard this advice
Over the last twenty years, I've probably built around a hundred computers. It's not very difficult, and in fact, it's gotten a whole lot easier over the years as computers become more highly integrated. Consider what it would take to build something very modern
When we initially deployed our handbuilt colocated servers [https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun/] for Discourse in 2013, I needed a way to provide an isolated VPN channel in for secure remote access and troubleshooting. Rather than dedicate a whole server to this task, I purchased the inexpensive, open source firmware
In 2007 I wrote about using PNGout to produce amazingly small PNG images [https://blog.codinghorror.com/getting-the-most-out-of-png/]. I still refer to this topic frequently, as seven years later, the average PNG I encounter on the Internet is very unlikely to be optimized. For example, consider this recent Perry Bible
I saw in today's news that Apple open sourced their Swift language [https://t.co/KpC9xID5kU]. One of the most influential companies in the world explicitly adopting an open source model – that's great! I'm a believer. One of the big reasons we founded Discourse
I've loved many computers in my life [https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-loving-computers-is-wrong-i-dont-want-to-be-right/], but the HTPC has always had a special place in my heart. It's the only always-on workhorse computer in our house, it is utterly silent, totally reliable, sips power, and it's at
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum [http://www.computerhistory.org/] – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right?
The last time I seriously upgraded my PC was in 2011, because the PC is over. And in some ways, it truly is – they can slap a ton more CPU cores on a die, for sure, but the overall single core performance increase from a 2011 high end Intel CPU