Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

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Jeff Atwood

Our Brave New World of 4K Displays

It's been three years since I last upgraded monitors. Those inexpensive Korean 27" IPS panels [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ips-lcd-revolution/], with a resolution of 2560×1440 – also known as 1440p – have served me well. You have no idea how many people I've witnessed being Wrong

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Welcome to The Internet of Compromised Things

This post is a bit of a public service announcement, so I'll get right to the point: > Every time you use WiFi, ask yourself: could I be connecting to the Internet through a compromised router with malware? It's becoming more and more common to see

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I Tried VR and It Was Just OK

It's been about a year and a half since I wrote The Road to VR [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-to-vr/], and a … few … things have happened since then. * Facebook bought Oculus for a skadillion dollars * I have to continually read thinkpieces describing how the mere act of strapping

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Doing Terrible Things To Your Code

In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them. I

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What is Trolling?

If you engage in discussion on the Internet long enough, you're bound to encounter it: someone calling someone else a troll. The common interpretation of Troll is the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Lord of the Rings, "hangs out under a bridge" type of troll. Thus, a

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Your Password is Too Damn Short

I'm a little tired of writing about passwords [https://www.google.com/webhp?ie=UTF-8#q=site:codinghorror.com+passwords]. But like taxes, email, and pinkeye, they're not going away any time soon. Here's what I know to be true, and backed up by

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Given Enough Money, All Bugs Are Shallow

Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar], famously wrote > Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less

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Toward a Better Markdown Tutorial

It's always surprised me when people, especially technical people, say they don't know Markdown [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown]. Do you not use GitHub? Stack Overflow? Reddit? I get that an average person may not understand how Markdown is based on simple old-school plaintext ASCII

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Our Programs Are Fun To Use

These two imaginary guys [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros] influenced me heavily as a programmer. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros] Instead of guaranteeing fancy features or compatibility or error free operation, Beagle Bros software promised something else altogether: fun. Playing with the Beagle Bros quirky Apple

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The God Login

I graduated with a Computer Science minor from the University of Virginia in 1992. The reason it's a minor and not a major is because to major in CS at UVa you had to go through the Engineering School, and I was absolutely not cut out for that

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The Evolution of eInk

Sure, smartphones and tablets get all the press, and deservedly so. But if you place the original mainstream eInk device from 2007, the Amazon Kindle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#First_generation], side by side with today's model, the evolution of eInk devices is just as

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Because Reading is Fundamental

Most discussions show a bit of information next to each user: What message does this send? * The only number you can control printed next to your name is post count. * Everyone who reads this will see your current post count. * The more you post, the bigger that number next to

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