Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
design patterns
A recent post by Steve Makofsky reminded me that the excellent UI Patterns and Techniques site is now a book from O'Reilly – Designing Interfaces. There’s technically no reason to buy a book on visual design patterns when you can find the same information online... * GUI design patterns
programming languages
Have you ever worked with developers that were charter members of the third-party-control-of-the-month club? You know the kind – they never met a third party control they didn’t like. They spend all day trolling downloads and experimenting with every tool listed on The Daily Grind. Which means deploying your solution
responsive design
From the “why I don’t read Robert Scoble any more” department: One thing I wish is that Web site developers/designers would look at their site on a small screen with limited bandwidth. So many sites suck really bad. I’m going to call these sites out with increasing
software development
In Humanizing Peer Reviews, Karl Wiegers starts with a powerful pronouncement: Peer review – an activity in which people other than the author of a software deliverable examine it for defects and improvement opportunities – is one of the most powerful software quality tools available. Peer review methods include inspections, walkthroughs, peer
audio programming
I’ve always been fascinated with 3d positional audio through headphones. The nice thing about headphones is that they don’t bug your neighbors or your wife – and they’re actually the best way to hear surround sound, too: But for some surround sound, particularly 3D positional computer audio, headphones
windows xp
I’m not sure exactly why, but the guys at winhistory.de managed to install Windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium 1 system with 32 megabytes of RAM: That puts the XP in back in Windows XP – Xtremely Pokey: The CPU is working at 60% of full capacity at
software development concepts
It’s ironic that the popular DivX codec has all but obliterated the identity of the ill-fated DIVX pay-per-view rental system. VS. So what was DIVX? DIVX (Digital Video Express) was a rental format variation on the DVD player in which a customer would buy a DIVX disc – physically similar
virtual machines
Lately I’ve been spending more and more time inside virtual machines. Whenever I need to try out a new bit of software, whether it’s a small shell extension, or a giant product like Team System – I tear off a new VM first. I don’t want to junk
programming languages
When I read Wesner Moise’s post on Asperger's Syndrome, I wasn’t surprised. Many of the best software developers I’ve known share some of the traits associated with Asperger’s Syndrome: 1. Social impairments It is worth noting that because it is classified as a spectrum
security
I’ve recently been struggling with a number of racing sims I bought to use after work hours in our new racing cockpit. I’m a big believer in supporting developers. I’m a developer myself. But digging around for CDs or DVDs is impractical for dedicated gaming rigs, so
regex
I was intrigued by a recent comment from a Microsoft Hotmail developer on the pitfalls they’ve run into while upgrading Hotmail to .NET 2.0: Regular Expressions can be very expensive. Certain (unintended and intended) strings may cause RegExes to exhibit exponential behavior. We’ve taken several hotfixes for
.net
I just updated my post The Bloated World of Managed Code with baseline memory footprints for Console and Winforms apps in .NET 2.0. I’ll admit I am a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to managed code apps. Now that tiny, native BitTorrent clients are available such