Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
hardware
The last time I seriously upgraded my PC was in 2011, because the PC is over. And in some ways, it truly is – they can slap a ton more CPU cores on a die, for sure, but the overall single core performance increase from a 2011 high end Intel CPU
4k displays
It’s been three years since I last upgraded monitors. Those inexpensive Korean 27″ IPS panels, 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 On The Internet on these babies. I recently
security
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 malware installed not
virtual reality
It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote 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 a VR headset on your face
programming languages
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
internet culture
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 troll is someone who
password security
I’m a little tired of writing about 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 plenty of empirical data: * No matter what you tell them, users will always choose simple
open source
Eric Raymond, in 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 buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this “Linus’s Law.
markdown
It’s always surprised me when people, especially technical people, say they don’t know 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 typing conventions. Like when you’re *really* excited
programming languages
These two imaginary guys influenced me heavily as a programmer. 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 II floppies in middle school and high school, and the smorgasboard of oddball hobbyist
algorithms
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 kind
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, side by side with today’s model, the evolution of eInk devices is just as striking. Each of these devices has a 6 inch eInk