Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and RGMII. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood
Standard Browser Keyboard Shortcuts

keyboard shortcuts

Standard Browser Keyboard Shortcuts

All modern browsers have extensive keyboard shortcuts: * Internet Explorer * Firefox * Chrome * Safari I tested every shortcut, and here’s my list of keyboard shortcuts that work in all browsers – or, for the rare keyboard shortcuts I found especially useful, those that work in at least two of the above browsers.

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Lotus Notes: Survival of the Unfittest

enterprise software

Lotus Notes: Survival of the Unfittest

Via Ole Eichhorn, the UK Guardian’s Survival of the Unfittest: Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive? We’ve all had bad software experiences. However, at one of my jobs,

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Presentation Zen

communication

Presentation Zen

So I’ve been critical of other people’s presentations. Which naturally leads to a few questions: * What makes a presentation good? * Why don’t you try giving a presentation? I realize that giving presentations isn’t easy. But I still feel that some speakers haven’t done the basic

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On Audio Visualization

music technology

On Audio Visualization

I’m a big music fan. And as a longtime computer enthusiast, I’ve always been intrigued by the intersection of computers and music: audio visualization. The first experience I had with visualization was the 1993 CD-ROM add-on for Atari’s short-lived Jaguar console. It included Jeff

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Hazmat Placards and Icons

icons

Hazmat Placards and Icons

It’s good to know that others share my weird fascination with signs. Ian Albert has a page dedicated to hazmat placards: Ian created high quality, hand-traced PDFs for each placard. Now that’s dedication. But he also offers this amusing warning: Don’t use these decoratively in a

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programming languages

The Day Performance Didn’t Matter Any More

OSNews published a nine-language performance roundup in early 2004. The results are summarized here: intlongdoubletrigI/OVisual C++9.618.86.43.510.548.8Visual C#9.723.917.74.19.965.3gcc C9.828.89.514.910.073.0Visual Basic9.823.717.74.130.785.9Visual J#9.623.

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.NET Pet Shop 4

.net

.NET Pet Shop 4

Vertigo Software’s .NET Pet Shop 4.0 article just went live on MSDN. It’s Pet Shop! You know... our old pal, Pet Shop: However, unlike previous versions of Pet Shop, this version is not a benchmark comparison with Java. It’s purely a showcase for ASP.NET 2.

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debugging

Revisiting Edit and Continue

Edit and Continue, which shipped in Visual Studio 2005, is generally regarded as A Good Thing. It’s pretty difficult to argue against the benefits of immediacy when debugging, but that isn’t about to stop some people: * Frans Bouma People who grew up with assemblers, the gnu commandline C

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security

Keeping Private Keys Private

After I posted the CodeProject article .NET Encryption Simplified, a reader asked this question in the comments: I would like to know what your thoughts are on private key storage in applications. I believe the recommended practice is to use the DPAPI, but I have found this to be too

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Smart Tags and Sane Keyboard Shortcuts

visual studio 2005

Smart Tags and Sane Keyboard Shortcuts

I constantly rename variables. It’s probably the single most frequent refactoring activity I do. And that’s why I love Visual Studio 2005’s built-in Smart Tags feature. If you’re not familiar with smart tags, check out K. Scott Allen’s post; he has some nice screenshots

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software development

Don’t Acronymize Your Users

As a commenter noted in my previous post on how not to give a presentation, I have another complaint about software development presentations that I didn’t list. They’re chock full of meaningless acronyms. SOAP, BI, SOA, RDBMS, SGML, CRUD, RMS, RDBMS, XML, ORM, FAQ. I appreciate the need

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How Not to Give a Presentation

communication skills

How Not to Give a Presentation

I hold speakers to relatively high standards. They get paid to present to large groups because they’re ostensibly good communicators. And I cannot believe the beginner mistakes some of the speakers are making here at VSLive. Based on my experiences over the last two days, here are a few

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