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
storage
In the last three years, I’ve gone from carrying a 512 MB USB memory stick to a 16 GB USB memory stick. That’s pretty amazing. According to the storagereview.com archives, hard drives with 16 GB of storage were introduced sometime around the beginning of 1999. Barely 10
ui design
Although I rather like Windows Vista – I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted – there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disappointing than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal. It’s
security
One of the most impressive hacks I’ve ever read about has to be the Black Sunday kill. Since the original 2001 Slashdot article I read on this is 99.9% quote, I’m going to do the same. I can see why they quoted so extensively; it’d be
programming languages
I seldom pause to answer criticism of my blog. If I did, I’d have time for little else in the course of the day, and no time for constructive work. But occasionally I’ll encounter a particularly well written critique that gives me pause, such as Alastair Rankine’s
spam
Have you ever used Craigslist? It’s an almost entirely free, mostly anonymous classified advertising service which evolved from an early internet phenomenon into a service so powerful it is often accused of single-handedly destroying the newspaper business. Unfortunately, these same characteristics also make Craigslist a particularly juicy target
programming languages
I can’t remember when, exactly, I discovered Clay Shirky, but I suspect it was around 2003 or so. I sent him an email about micropayments, he actually answered it, and we had a rather nice discussion on the topic. I’ve been a fan of Clay’s writing ever
authentication
As we continue to work on the code that will eventually become stackoverflow, we belatedly realized that we’d be contributing to the glut of username and passwords on the web. I have fifty online logins, and I can’t remember any of them! Adding that fifty-first set of
php
Here’s a list of every function beginning with the letter “A” in the PHP function index: abs() acos() acosh() addcslashes() addslashes() aggregate() aggregate_info() aggregate_methods() aggregate_methods_by_list() aggregate_methods_by_regexp() aggregate_properties() aggregate_properties_by_list() aggregate_properties_by_regexp() aggregation_info() apache_child_terminate(
software development
In yesterday’s post on Crashing Responsibly, I outlined a few ways to improve your application’s crash behavior. In the event that your application crashes – and oh, it will – why not turn that crash into something that: * Records lots of diagnostic information developers can use to improve the application
software development concepts
As programmers, it is our responsibility to ensure that when something goes horribly wrong with our software, the user has a reasonable escape plan. It’s an issue of fundamental safety in software error handling that I liken to those ubiquitous airline safety cards. Which one accurately depicts the way
open source
In Where Are All The Open Source Billionaires? I used this chart as an illustration: Because open source code is freely distributable, anyone can take that code and create their own unique mutant mashup version of it any time they feel like it. Whether anyone else in the world will
html
One of the things we’re thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they’re entering on the site. Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI