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

programming languages

So You Don’t Want to be a Programmer After All

I get a surprising number of emails from career programmers who have spent some time in the profession and eventually decided it just isn’t for them. Most recently this: I finished a computer science degree last year, worked about a year in the Java EE stack. I liked requirements

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.net

Why Ruby?

I’ve been a Microsoft developer for decades now. I weaned myself on various flavors of home computer Microsoft Basic, and I got my first paid programming gigs in Microsoft FoxPro, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Visual Basic. I have seen the future of programming, my friends, and it is terrible

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Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

software development

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That’s a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We’d love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don’t use your thing. Even if I tried

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internet activism

The End of Ragequitting

When Joel Spolsky, my business partner on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, asked me what I wanted to do after I left Stack Exchange, I distinctly remember mentioning Aaron Swartz. That’s what Aaron was to us hackers: an exemplar of the noble, selfless behavior and positive action that all

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web development

Web Discussions: Flat by Design

It’s been six years since I wrote Discussions: Flat or Threaded? and, despite a bunch of evolution on the web since then, my opinion on this has not fundamentally changed. If anything, my opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models survive on the

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history

The Organism Will Do Whatever It Damn Well Pleases

In the go-go world of software development, we’re so consumed with learning new things, so fascinated with the procession of shiny new objects that I think we sometimes lose sight of our history. I don’t mean the big era-defining successes. Everyone knows those stories. I’m talking about

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user experience

For a Bit of Colored Ribbon

For the last year or so, I've been getting these two page energy assessment reports in the mail from Pacific Gas & Electric, our California utility company, comparing our household's energy use to those of the houses around us. Here's the relevant excerpts from

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touchscreens

Touch Laptops

I'm a little embarrassed to admit how much I like the Surface RT. I wasn't expecting a lot when I ordered it, but after a day of use, I realized this was more than Yet Another Gadget. It might represent a brave new world of laptop

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usb 3.0

A SSD in Your Pocket

Updated August 2015 I woke up a few days ago and realized I was still carrying the same 32 GB USB flash drive on my keychain that I purchased in 2010. I thought to myself, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. Totally. Unacceptable. It's been few years

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chromebooks

Do You Wanna Touch

Traditional laptops may have reached an evolutionary dead-end (or, more charitably, a plateau), but it is an amazing time for things that … aren't quite traditional laptops. The Nexus 7 is excellent, the Nexus 10 looks fantastic, I can't wait to get my hands on the twice-as-fast

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programming languages

The Future of Markdown

Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing. Meaning, if you enter this… …you get this! Lightweight Markup Languages ============================ According to **Wikipedia**: > A [lightweight markup language](http://is.gd/gns) is a markup language with a

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programming languages

Judging Websites

I was invited to judge the Rails Rumble last year, but was too busy to participate. When they extended the offer again this year, I happily accepted. The Rails Rumble is a distributed programming competition where teams of one to four people, from all over the world, have 48 hours

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