Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
monitor calibration
If you’ve invested in a quality monitor for your computer, you owe it to yourself – and your eyes – to spend 15 minutes setting it up properly for your viewing environment. I’m not talking about a high-end color calibration, although you can certainly do that. I’m talking about
video upload
As video on the web becomes increasingly mainstream, I’ve been dabbling a bit with video sharing myself. But I’ve found that publishing video content on the web is extraordinarily painful, bordering on cruel and unusual punishment. The web upload process is a serious barrier to online video sharing,
programming concepts
Software developers do love to code. But very few of them, in my experience, can explain why they’re coding. Try this exercise on one of your teammates if you don’t believe me. Ask them what they’re doing. Then ask them why they’re doing it, and keep
multiplayer gaming
Attending yesterday’s Halo 3 launch event at the Silicon Valley Microsoft campus – and the large Halo3 tournament we helped moderate – got me thinking about player ranking and matching systems. Without a well-designed ranking and matching system in place, you’ll get horribly mismatched games, where one team demolishes the
software development concepts
I often trot out Steve McConnell’s doghouse analogy to illustrate how small projects aren’t necessarily representative of the problems you’ll encounter on larger projects. People who have written a few small programs in college sometimes think that writing large, professional programs is the same kind of work
hardware
Steve Olson contacted me a few weeks ago after he saw my post on ergonomic computing. Steve works for Ergotron, and offered to comp me some monitor arms. Usually when I get offered free items related to my blog, I politely decline. I don’t want a conflict of interest,
user experience
I’m one of the rare people who actually likes Windows Vista. Sure, it’s far from what was originally promised in terms of features, but it’s still a solid quality of life improvement from the crusty old 2001 version of Windows XP. Or at least it will be,
unit testing
Let’s say you’re about to deploy an application. Said app has been heavily tested by your development team, who have all been infected by unit testing fever. It’s also been vetted by your QA group, who spent months spelunking into every crevice of the app. You even
community-driven
It’s hard to pin down the exact etymology of the word Lazyweb, but it seems to have one primary meaning: 1. Asking a question of an internet audience in the hopes that they will be able to find a solution that you were too lazy or inexperienced to find
computer science
While researching Classic Computer Science Puzzles, our CEO Scott Stanfield turned me on to A.K. Dewdney’s The New Turing Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science. This is an incredibly fun little book. Sure, it’s got Towers of Hanoi, but it’s also got so much more: The
security
The web is nothing if not a maze of user accounts and logins. Almost everywhere you go on the web requires yet another new set of credentials. Unified login seems to elude us at the moment, so the status quo is an explosion of usernames and passwords for every user.
programming languages
Software developers do have a proclivity for puzzles. Perhaps that’s why books like To Mock a Mockingbird exist. It’s a collection of logic puzzles which is considered an introduction to lambda calculus, one of the core concepts of Lisp. Such puzzle questions are de rigueur for many programming