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
programming languages
I’ve written before about the dubious value of functional specifications. If you want to experience the dubious value of specifications first hand, try writing a tool to read and write ID3 tags. ID3 tags describe the metadata for an MP3 file, such as Artist, Album, Track, and so forth.
font rendering
I’ve been vacillating a bit on ClearType recently. I love ClearType in theory. A threefold improvement in horizontal resolution on LCDs is an incredible step forward for computer displays. Internet Explorer 7 forces the issue a bit by always defaulting to ClearType for web content, even if you haven’
regular expressions
We’re working on a little shell utility that displays paths in a menu. Some of these paths can get rather long, so I cooked up this little regular expression to shorten them. It’s a replacement, so you call it like this: static string PathShortener(string path) { const string
open source
Here’s Scott Hanselman on the death of nDoc: We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it’s free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding. You don’t get to criticize a free puppy that you bring in to your home. Free like
programming languages
Stiff recently asked a few programmers a series of open-ended questions: * How did you learn programming? Were schools of any use? * What’s the most important skill every programmer should have? * Are math and physics important skills for a programmer? * What will be the next big thing in computer
xml
Here’s a helpful article that documents common pitfalls to avoid when composing XML documents. Nobody wants to be called an XML Bozo by Tim Bray, the co-editor of the XML specification, right? There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully hard — if not impossible
operating systems
John Gruber gloats that Windows XP does not fare well in a comparison against OS X: But everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto – a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn’t. Even the
c#
Here’s a question that recently came up on an internal mailing list: how do I create an enum with a name that happens to be a c# keyword? I immediately knew the answer for VB.net; you use brackets to delimit the word. Public Enum test [Public] [Private] End
Edward Tufte, in his new book, Beautiful Evidence, continues on his crusade for information density. Here’s a representative recap of a Tufte seminar from 2001: Tufte spent most of his talk walking around the room while talking on a wireless mike. He had two projectors set up, but for
software development
Joel Spolsky came up with a twelve-item checklist in August, 2000 that provides a rough measure of – in his words – “how good a software team is”: 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do
productivity
I’ve always thought it was ironic that low priority emails are the ones I see first in my inbox. Marking something with a low priority makes it stand out from all the others. Doesn’t that make it implicitly high priority? One man’s urgent is another man’s
unit testing
J. Timothy King has a nice piece on the twelve benefits of writing unit tests first. Unfortunately, he seriously undermines his message by ending with this: However, if you are one of the [coders who won’t give up code-first], one of those curmudgeon coders who would rather be