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
xml
Occasionally I’ll write about things that I find sort of mildly, vaguely thought provoking, and somehow that writing turns out to be ragingly controversial once posted here. Case in point, XML: The Angle Bracket Tax. I’m still encountering people online who almost literally hate my guts because I
software development
As I was paging through Steve Yegge’s voluminous body of work recently, I was struck by a 2005 entry on practicing programming: Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills,
c#
I sometimes (often, actually) regress a few years mentally and forget to take advantage of new features afforded by the tools I’m using. In this case, we’re using the latest and greatest version of C#, which offers implicitly typed local variables. While working on Stack Overflow, I was
software development practices
Today’s rumination is not for the weak of heart. It’s from the venerable C2 Wiki page Code For The Maintainer: Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Perhaps a little over the top, but
games
I’ve always been fascinated by physics-based gameplay. Even going back to the primeval days of classic arcade gaming, I found vector-based games, with their vastly simplified 2D approximations of physics and motion, more compelling than their raster brethren. I’m thinking of games like Asteroids, Battlezone, and
code review
Ben Collins-Sussman on programmer insecurity: What do you do when somebody shows up to an open source project with a gigantic new feature that took months to write? Who has the time to review thousands of lines of code? What if there was a bad design decision made early
programming languages
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about: $ # % {} * [] ~ & <> Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing – such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark – have radically different meaning
programming
In Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand I marveled at particularly strange and wonderful comment left on this blog. Some commenters wondered if that comment was generated through Markov chains. I considered that, but I had a hard time imagining a text corpus input that could possibly
ruby
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the book Beautiful Code, but one of the better chapters is Tim Bray’s “Finding Things.” In it, he outlines the creation of a small Ruby program: counts = {} counts.default = 0 ARGF.each_line do |line| if line =~ %r{GET /ongoing/When/dddx/(dddd/
software development concepts
I believe very strongly that a blog without comments is not a blog. For me, the whole point of this blogging exercise is the many-way communication of the comments – between me and the commenters, and among the commenters themselves. As I said in How To Advertise on Your Blog
programming languages
What do you think the single greatest invention in computer science is? Besides the computer itself, I mean. Seriously, before reading any further, pause here for a moment and consider the question. I’ve talked before about how young so-called modern computer programming languages really are, and it bears
security
A number of people whose opinions I greatly respect have turned me on to Yelp over the last six months or so. Yelp is a community review site, and a great way to discover cool new places in whatever neighborhood you happen to be in. I’ve enjoyed using Yelp,