Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
user experience
In my opinion, the new Office 2007 user interface is one of the most innovative things to come out of Redmond in years. It’s nothing less than the death of the main menu as a keystone GUI metaphor. This is a big deal. Historically, where Office goes, everyone else
user experience
I remember switching my homepage from AltaVista to Google back in 2000 for one simple reason: it was blazingly fast. It’s the same reason I don't use personalized Google, or Google suggest as my homepage: they’re simply too slow. Dare Obasanjo* wonders if AJAX apps are
software development
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a single screencast equal to a thousand word blog post? There’s a lot to be said for lightweight, embedded screencasts. I’m particularly fond of animated GIF screencasts for small demonstrations. You can see examples in these posts: one, two,
tags: software development concepts
Leon Bambrick is full of good ideas. Like KeyTraino, for instance: When you use the toolbar, the menus or the context-menus of an application, KeyTraino shows the alternative keystroke you could’ve used. Evidently someone at SlickEdit is wearing a tinfoil hat that transmits at the same frequency as
customization
Vendors often pitch customization as a feature of their software: In the end, customizations and enhancements to a software solution are nearly always needed. This allows the software to be tailored to your needs, allowing for greater success, either with users or in business processes. They shouldn’t be considered
history
I read Robert X Cringley’s book Accidental Empires shortly after it was published in 1992. It’s a gripping worm’s eye view of Silicon Valley’s formative years. It’s also Doc Searls’ favorite book about the computer industry. Highly recommended. I didn’t realize that the book
arcade gaming
The first video game to introduce a high score table was Asteroids, and after that they were a key fixture in virtually every arcade game from the 80s and 90s. One of my favorite high score tables was in Gaplus, the little known sequel to the mega-popular Galaga, which
programming languages
Here’s an excellent bit of Halloween advice from Mike Gunderloy: go read some source code you wrote five years ago for a real scare. It’s a good idea to go occasionally back to the well and get a sense of your progress as a so-called professional software
security
I recently got into a spirited discussion about Akismet. What is Akismet? When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. Akismet is awfully
virtualization
If you use virtual machines at all, you should have the single most important virtual machine performance tip committed to heart by now: always run your virtual machines from a separate physical hard drive: [the] biggest performance win is to put the virtual hard disks on separate disk spindles from
software development
Although I’ve been dismissive of build servers in the past, I’ve increasingly come to believe that the build server is critical – it’s the heart monitor of your software project. It can tell you when your project is healthy, and it can give you advance warning when your
security
If you’ve used the internet at all in the last few years, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of CAPTCHAs: Of course, nobody wants to use CAPTCHAs. They’re a necessary evil, just like the locks on the doors to your home and your car. CAPTCHAs are