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
programming languages
Our old pal A. K. Dewdney first introduced the world to Core War in a series of Scientific American articles starting in 1984. (Full page scans of the articles, including the illustrations, are also available.) Core War was inspired by a story I heard some years ago about a mischievous
software development concepts
(Update: This piece originally ran on April Fools’ day; although the content of the post is not an April Fools’ joke, the retro styling definitely was. View a screenshot of how this post looked on April 1, 2008) I occasionally follow Jamie Zawinski’s blog. Jamie’s an interesting guy.
user-experience
You may know Bruce Tognazzini from his days as Apple Computer employee #66, or perhaps his classic books Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design. He’s still quite relevant today; his list of the ten most persistent UI bugs is an excellent reminder that many of the biggest
technology trends
I lived in the Denver area at the time Denver International Airport’s completely computer automated baggage system was unveiled in 1994. The troubled development of this system was big local news. The premise of Denver’s plan was as big as the West. The distance from a centralized baggage
user experience
Despite Apple’s historical insistence that the computer mouse should only have one button – which led to the highly unfortunate convention of double-clicking – most mice have more than one button today. In his classic book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin revisits the earliest days of his involvement with the
unicode
These are available as bumper stickers and t-shirts: Here’s my rhetorical question to you: why is this funny? * The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) * There Ain’t No Such Thing as Plain Text * On the Goodness of
software development concepts
I like to re-read my favorite books every few years, so I brought Robert Glass’ seminal Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering with me on my most recent trip. I thought it was a decent, but imperfect read when I originally bought it in 2004. As I scanned through
software development
This classic Eric Lippert post describes, in excruciating, painful detail, exactly how much work it takes to add a single ChangeLightBulbWindowHandleEx function to a codebase at Microsoft: * One dev to spend five minutes implementing ChangeLightBulbWindowHandleEx. * One program manager to write the specification. * One localization expert to review the specification for
gaming
You may remember Sierra’s ImagiNation network from the earliest days of dial-up networking: The ImagiNation Network (INN), aka The Sierra Network (TSN), was the first online multiplayer gaming system. Developed by Sierra On-Line in 1989, and first available to the public in 1991, the ImagiNation Network was
software development concepts
I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays – repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters – are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time. That’s more than I can
programming concepts
You know the feeling. It’s happened to all of us at some point: you’ve pored over the code a dozen times and still can’t find a problem with it. But there’s some bug or error you can’t seem to get rid of. There just has
gadgets
Every self-respecting geek loves gadgets. I’m no exception. And so many of my favorite gadgets have a voracious appetite for batteries. I don’t know why all the other battery types fell so far out of favor, but between AA and AAA, I could probably power 95% of