Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
ruby
Joseph Cooney reminds us that, in January 2005, 37signals went live with a product they built in 579 lines of code: You read that right, not 60,000 or 600,000 but instead a commercial project written in less than 600 lines of Ruby code. When I first saw this
interview process
The job market for software developers is hot. This is great news for programmers, but it makes the interview process challenging for potential employers. A reader recently wrote me expressing some concern about the interview process: You mention Vertigo requiring a code sample, then a phone screening, then a hands-on
operating systems
Over time, I’ve become something of a desktop minimalist. Sure, I’ll change a few settings to my liking, but I no longer spend a lot of time customizing my desktop configuration. I’ve learned that if the defaults aren’t reasonably close to correct out of the box,
presentation skills
After being on both the giving and receiving end of plenty of presentations, I now realize there’s one golden rule which applies to all of them: Entertain your audience. Every slide of your presentation should serve this fundamental vision statement. Is it entertaining? I don’t mean each slide
conference
I have the distinct honor of speaking at this year’s CUSEC, which runs from today until Saturday. So what, exactly, is CUSEC? CUSEC is the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, an annual conference about the most interesting topics in software engineering organized for and by students from universities across
typography
Over the Christmas break, my wife and I visited New York City for the first time. One of the many highlights of our trip was the Museum of Modern Art, which is running a year-long special exhibit, 50 Years of Helvetica. It’s a tiny exhibit tucked away in a
keyboard shortcuts
Nobody has time to memorize a complete list of web browser keyboard shortcuts, and really, why should they? I only know a handful of web browser keyboard shortcuts, myself, and I probably use the same five shortcuts a hundred times a day. But not everyone knows about these five essential
technology trends
Over the last few years, I’ve become mildly obsessive about the contents of my keychain. Here’s what’s on my keychain today: In internet parlance, this is known as EDC or every-day carry. There’s an entire internet forum dedicated to the art and science of determining what
software development concepts
Greg Wilson recently emailed me the following question: I’m teaching a software engineering class to third-year students at the University of Toronto starting in January, and would like to include at least one hour on deployment – [deployment] never came up in any of my classes, and it’s glossed
programming languages
I saw on reddit that today, January 10th, is Donald Knuth’s seventieth birthday. Knuth is arguably the most famous living computer scientist, author of the seminal Art of Computer Programming series. Here’s how serious Mr. Knuth is – his books are dedicated, not to his wife or a loved
software development
Bruce Eckel deftly identifies the root cause of all software development problems: We are in a young business. Primitive, really – we don’t know much about what works, and we keep thinking we’ve found the silver bullet that solves all problems. As a result, we go through these multi-year
file management
What is user space? User space is the location in the filesystem where users put their personal files – their “stuff.” Here’s the user space folder structure in the Windows XP operating system: Documents and SettingsUser Application Data Cookies Desktop Favorites Local Settings My Documents My Music My Pictures My