Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase "Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industry" in late 2004. It's a scary analogy, but an apt one. I've seen developers struggle for
In a world of 43Folders [http://www.43folders.com/]* and dozens of other blogs that worship at the altar of Getting Things Done [http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done/], it's a little surprising that nobody has taken aim at the #1 enemy of productivity everywhere: The
Jonathan Edwards' Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front [http://alarmingdevelopment.org/index.php?p=5] is an inspiring call to arms for programmers who are fed up with the status quo of Java and C#. Maybe it is time to open your window, stick your head out and yell,
Ian Griffiths recently wrote a proof of concept WPF browser for the MSDN online help [http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2006/06/21/wpfmsdn]. One of the improvements cited is multi-column text: > This is why WPF offers a column-based reading experience. We know from experience in the print
Let's say you wanted to generate and render this XML fragment: <status code="1" /> <data> <usergroup id="usr" /> </data> Here's a fully object-oriented way of building it: System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.
The unofficial wikipedia blog entry The Future of Open Source Five Years Ago [http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html] makes some fascinating comparisons between the adoption rate of Linux and the adoption rate of Wikipedia. > Server-side Linux is still a powerful force, but what happened to the
Christopher Seiwald's Seven Pillars of Pretty Code [http://www.perforce.com/perforce/papers/prettycode.html] argues that code that looks good, works good: 1. Code changes should blend in with the original style.It should not be possible to discern previous changes to a file without seeing the
One of my favorite things to play on Verticade, our full size MAME arcade machine, is pinball simulators. There's something about the completely digital simulation of analog gameplay that fascinates me. Plus, it's easy to take five or ten minutes out for a quick game of
I was desperately trying to avoid the expense of buying a new laptop, but my work-provided Thinkpad T43 just isn't cutting it for me. The problem with Thinkpads, even the very nice new T60 models, is deeper than the hardware and the classic black box design. Thinkpads are
This guy* who gave a presentation with Patrick Cauldwell yesterday revealed his desktop during the presentation. Here's what it looked like: After the presentation, I ribbed him about his desktop. You have a few square millimeters of desktop left uncovered, I said. Clearly you have your work cut
I'm currently reading Steve McConnell's new book, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735605351/codihorr-20]. The section on individual expert judgment provided one simple reason why my estimates are often so horribly wrong:> If you ask a developer
Or, What Would World Wide Web Developers Do? To get an idea of what web developers are using -- as compared to typical web users -- take a look at the comprehensive w3schools browser statistics, picking up from mid-2004 when the Google statistics end: Quite a difference from the other