Jeff Atwood

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

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

social media

Please Read The Comments

I find the Don’t Read The Comments movement kind of sad. In 2006 I said that a blog without comments is not a blog and I stand behind that statement. There have been brief periods where my own blog has been temporarily without comments, but they will always come

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psychology

The Trap You Set For Yourself

The Dan Ariely books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, profoundly influenced the way I design my massively multiplayer typing games. These books offer science in the small about human behavior, and stark insights into user behavior – and by that I mean our own behavior. All detectives are by

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blogging

10 Years of Coding Horror

In 2007, I was offered $120,000 to buy this blog outright. I was sorely tempted, because that’s a lot of money. I had to think about it for a week. Ultimately I decided that my blog was an integral part of who I was, and who I eventually

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programming languages

App-pocalypse Now

I’m getting pretty sick of being nagged to install your damn apps. XKCD helpfully translates: Yeah, there are smart app banners, which are marginally less annoying, but it’s amazing how quickly we went from “Cool! Phone apps that finally don’t suck!” to this sad, eye rolling, oh-great-of-course-you-have-an-app-too

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software development concepts

Complaint-Driven Development

If I haven’t blogged much in the last year, it’s because we’ve been busy building that civilized discourse construction kit thing I talked about. (Yes, that’s actually the name of the company. This is what happens when you put me in charge of naming things. Pinball

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virtual reality

The Road to VR

A month after I wrote about John Carmack, he left id Software to become the CTO of Oculus. This was big news for two reasons: 1. Carmack founded id in the early 90s. An id Software without Carmack is like an Apple without Woz and Jobs. You wouldn’t leave

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battery life

Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

I’ve become a huge fan of touch computing. I believe that most things we think of as “computers” will be de-facto tablets, either in our pocket, in our hands, possibly even mounted on our wrists or forearms. I can’t wait for the iPad 5 this week (I’ll

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gamedev

You Don’t Need Millions of Dollars

Masters of Doom is the story of John Carmack and John Romero creating the seminal games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It’s an amazing work on so many levels – but primarily because of the exhaustive research the author undertook to tell this story. To re-create the story of the

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Updating Your Utility Belt

technology trends

Updating Your Utility Belt

I just updated my utility belt. Well, metaphorically speaking – every self-respecting geek has one. Lately I’ve been trying to minimize what I carry around even further. After having children I’ve come to appreciate the value of less stuff in my life. So here’s my everyday carry in

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mini-itx

The 2013 HTPC Build

I no longer own any laptops. Everything in our house is a tablet: multiple Nexus 7s, multiple iPad 4s, and a Surface Pro. In fact, the only traditional computers I own are my triple-monitor desktop home office beast, and the small Home Theater PC (HTPC) that drives all our home

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keyboards

The CODE Keyboard

What would you do, if you could do anything? I don’t mean in a fantasy superhero way, but in terms of resources. If someone told you that you now had the resources to attempt to make one thing happen in the world, one real thing, what would that be?

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software development concepts

The Rule of Three

Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we

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