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
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
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
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
programming practices
When you join a team, it’s important to bend your preferences a little to accommodate the generally accepted coding practices of that team. Not everyone has to agree on every miniscule detail of the code, of course, but it’s a good idea to discuss it with your team
developer productivity
In A Developer’s Second Most Important Asset, I described how buying a quality chair may be one of the smartest investments you can make as a software developer. In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I’ve come to one conclusion: you can’
open source
In Codeplex wastes six months reinventing wheels, Ryan Davis has a bone to pick with Microsoft: I saw an announcement [in March, 2007] that CodePlex, Microsoft’s version of Sourceforge, has released a source control client. This infuriates me. This cool thing they spent six months (six!) writing is called
computer science
Charles Petzold was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine. One look at the original title page of Turing’s paper is enough to convince me that we’
security
Bruce Schneier is something of a legend in the computer security community. He’s the author of the classic, oft-cited 1994 book Applied Cryptography, as well as several well-known cryptography algorithms. The cheeky Norris-esque design above is a reference to the actor names commonly used in examples
regular expressions
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
web development
I may not be smart enough to join Mensa, but I am smart enough not to build websites like the American Mensa website. Do you see the mistake? If so, can you explain why this is a mistake, and why you’d desperately want to avoid visiting websites that make