Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
user experience
I miss Kathy Sierra. Kathy was the primary author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which she started in December 2004. Her writing was of sufficient quality to propel her blog into the Technorati top 100 within a year and a half. That’s almost unheard of, particularly for a
microsoft
Well, you won’t technically see me at MIX08 this year. But you will see some very cool top-secret stuff Vertigo created in the keynote. MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft conference after attending the ’06 and ’07 iterations. And not just because this year they have a Rock
security
In November 2007 I called these three CAPTCHA implementations “unbreakable”: Google (unbreakable)Hotmail (unbreakable)Yahoo (unbreakable) 2008 is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed for CAPTCHAs: * Jan 17: InformationWeek reports Yahoo CAPTCHA broken * Feb 6: Websense reports Hotmail CAPTCHA broken * Feb 22: Websense reports Google CAPTCHA broken
file copy
If you’ve used Windows Vista, you’ve probably noticed that Vista’s file copy performance is noticeably worse than Windows XP. I know it’s one of the first things I noticed. Here’s the irony – Vista’s file copy is based on an improved algorithm and actually performs
software development
Ted Dennison left this astute comment in response to Do Not Listen to Your Users: Generally when I go talk to users, it is to educate myself enough to become a user like them. Then I can see what needs doing, what needs streamlining, reorganizing, rearranging, etc. This brought to
operating systems
David Heinemeier Hansson has a problem with Windows as a programming platform. While I can certainly understand the reasons why some people go with Linux, I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice. I know a few that are
software development concepts
Paul Buchheit on listening to users: I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that
communication
I’m a big fan of Twitter. The service itself is nothing revolutionary; it’s essentially public instant messaging. But don’t underestimate the power of taking a previously siloed, private one-to-one communication medium and making it public. Why talk to one person when you could talk to anyone who
programming languages
I was thrilled to see the book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think show up in my Amazon recommendations. It seems like exactly the type of book I would enjoy. So of course I bought a copy. Unfortunately, Beautiful Code wasn’t nearly as enjoyable of a read
assembly language
I was tickled to see that James Hague chose The Zen of Assembly Language Programming as one of five memorable books about programming. I wholeheartedly agree. Even if you never plan to touch a lick of assembly code in your entire professional career, this book is a fantastic and thoroughly
user experience
The original Tivo was one of the finest out of box experiences I’ve ever had as a consumer. I remember how exciting it was to tell friends about our newfound ability to pause live television, and how liberating it felt to be freed from the tyranny of television schedules.
user experience
We programmers are obsessive by nature. But I often get frustrated with the depth of our obsession over things like code coverage. Unit testing and code coverage are good things. But perfectly executed code coverage doesn’t mean users will use your program. Or that it’s even worth using