Jeff Atwood

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

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Jeff Atwood

The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming

Mention the words "maintenance programming" to a group of developers and they'll, to a man (or woman), recoil in horror. Maintenance programming is widely viewed as janitorial work. But maybe that's an unfair characterization. In Software Conflict 2.0 : The Art and Science of

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What's on Your Keychain.. in 2006?

A little over a year ago, I documented what was on my keychain. Here's what I have today: If you're troubled by what appears to be profanity on the Leatherman Squirt, I'll refer you to my previous post-- it's a Pulp Fiction

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Did IE6 Make Web 2.0 Possible?

One of the cornerstones of Web 2.0 is the XMLHttpRequest object [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest]. It allows JavaScript to call back to a web server without incurring a traditional HTTP postback. It's the heart and soul of AJAX [http://builder.com.com/5100-6371-6056954.html], and

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Programming Your Hands

Software developers, like pianists, rely on their hands to practice their craft. I've used a keyboard and mouse obsessively since my early teens. Fortunately, I have never had any problems with hand or wrist pain – nor have I experienced any Repetitive Stress Injury, which includes carpal tunnel syndrome.

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Don't Ask Us Questions. We'll Just Ignore You.

One of the funniest things on the internet, for my money, is Eric S. Raymond's epic FAQ, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way [http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]. It's 32 pages, 1,066 paragraphs, 10,289 words, and 51,757 characters. That

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Road Warrior Revisited

I've been traveling a bit more lately, which reminded me to update my list of recommended laptop travel accessories. Although I was happy with the Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse, the snap-in power off switch never worked very well for me. As a result, it got switched on a

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Love It, Hate It

Brendan Kidwell noted something interesting about the comments on Trackpoint versus Touchpad: You know, I just realized that there is a lot of LOVE and HATE going on, and it doesn't seem to be very unified. Software development is basically a religion. It's not surprising that

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Peopleware Revisited

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools list just selected a book from my recommended reading list. And it's one of my favorites, too. It's that perennial evergreen of project management, Peopleware: Hard-won wisdom fills this small book: How to create a team, place, or company that

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Touchpad vs. Trackpoint

When it comes to pointing devices on laptops, there are two schools of thought. There's the touchpad.. .. and there's the trackpoint, which was popularized by IBM thinkpads: I recently switched to a work-provided Thinkpad T40 as my primary laptop, and it has both trackpoint and touchpad--

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Do Modems Still Matter?

One of the key ingredients for Web 2.0 success is pervasive high speed internet access. The latest Pew internet report, which tracks broadband growth, was just released [http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/184/report_display.asp]: > At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed

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Pixels, Megapixels, and Desktop Resolutions

I've always wondered why digital cameras express their resolutions in terms of megapixels, rather than the typical pixel height and width numbers you find on computer displays. Nobody buys a 21" LCD with 1.9 megapixels of resolution; they buy a 21" LCD that can display

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Is the Command Prompt the New Desktop?

People keep rediscovering the article Don Norman posted a few months ago criticizing what he thinks of as Google's faux simplicity: "Oh," people rush to object, "the Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff." True, but that'

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