Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
user experience
Seth Godin showed this slide during a recent presentation at Google: Users don’t care about YOU. What’s the biggest web design mistake of 2004? 1. Believing people care about you and your web site. Why isn’t anyone reading our blog? 1. You’re not a good-looking female
programming languages
I’ll be attending SDWest 2006 all next week (March 13 - 17) in Santa Clara, California. If you’re attending, let’s meet up somewhere! I’ve met a handful of people in person at past conferences: * Sara Ford * Steve Maine * Walt Rischler The highlight of SDWest, however, will
programming conventions
Jon Galloway called me out in a comment yesterday for advocating a non-standard approach: Web forms have become a convention, and users have been trained for 10 years on how to fill out forms. Users would get confused, and some would bail out (abandon carts, etc.) Web forms work, and
forms
Why do HTML forms have to be death by a thousand tiny textboxes? The classic example of this is phone number, which typically forces you to tab through three annoying little textboxes to enter a single number. Why can’t we let the user enter the number however they like,
retro computing
My second true computer, after the TI-99/4a, was the Coleco Adam: I remember waiting in line in the snow with my Dad to get our hands on one of the first ADAM computers. Oh, the awful SmartBASIC programs I would write! I spent hours and hours hacking away in
ruby
Steve Yegge’s whirlwind language tour is, as he points out, neither good nor complete, which makes it one of the best blog posts I've read this year. I’ll spoil the ending for you: according to Steve, Ruby combines the best features of Perl, Smalltalk, Python, and
minimalism
John Maeda created quite a stir with his montage of the Yahoo and Google homepages from 1996 to 2006 in simple is about staying simple: Although Philipp Lenssen has posted on this topic before (he calls it the portal plague), it’s still striking. Altavista made the same mistake, and
programming languages
Inspired by my recent post on C# code snippets, I found a little console app by Francesco Balena* that enumerates all the snippets on your system along with their shortcut text. I improved his console app and turned it into a convenient IDE macro along the lines of my keyboard
ides
I just installed CodeRush, and now my IDE looks like this: From Mike Gunderloy’s review of Refactor! Pro: Refactor! uses the same drawing technology as CodeRush, making a video game out of your code. When you introduce an overload, for example, you actually see strikethroughs appear on parameters being
network troubleshooting
So I had a few bandwidth issues recently, which you can see in the six-month Alexa traffic graph for this domain. There wasn’t much I could do about the traffic spike. But I did make good use of two of my favorite tools for quick and dirty internet connection
error codes
A recent Scott Hanselman post described a problem he had with Windows Defender: Defender was unable to update my signatures, instead throwing a COM-ish 0x8024402c. Others are getting Error 1609 and still others 0x80240022. This isn’t an isolated incident. The latest release candidate of Team Foundation Server also returns
programming languages
I have nothing against World of Warcraft, but the Gamasutra editorial World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things highlights one problem I have with the entire MMORPG* genre: [WOW teaches players that] investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time