Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Artima has another great interview series, this time with Erich Gamma. You know, Erich Gamma: Gang of Four, JUnit, Eclipse. As you might expect from such a notable developer, it's full of great advice. Like this section on avoiding frameworkitis: Frameworkitis is the disease that a framework wants
If you're not reading the Wichita State Software Usability Research Laboratory newsletter regularly, you should be. It's an amazing source of usability experiments with actual data, hypotheses, citations, statistics, and all that other stuff that puts the science back into computer science. A 2001 SURL experiment
I try to avoid posting entries from the Mindless Link Propagation Department, but Adam Bosworth's article Learning from The Web is excellent and it deserves a careful read: The Web taught us several unintuitive lessons: 1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than
In Software Training Sucks: Why We Need to Roll it Back 1,000 Years [http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2005/11/15/software-training-sucks-roll-it-back/], Rob Walling makes a compelling argument for abandoning traditional training classes in favor of apprenticeships: > [Why not] use the time-tested approach of trades that have been doing
Let's say I was to search Google for the word Jaguar: There's an immediate problem. The semantics of Jaguar only exist in my head, not in any search box. Did I mean... * Jaguar the car? * OSX Jaguar? * Jaguar the animal? * The Atari Jaguar? * Austin Power'
One thing I dislike about ASP.NET is that it renders the entire web page in memory before sending one single byte of that page to the browser. Consider an ASP.NET page with an embedded DataGrid that relies on ten complex database queries over 15 seconds. Why can'
Did you know that the Windows 95 startup sound [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/Win95-startup-sound.mp3] was composed by avant-garde electronic musician Brian Eno [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno]? I had no idea until I saw it referenced on music thing [http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/
I've seen this kind of code a lot recently: try { int i = 0; int x = 0; Console.WriteLine(i / x); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } This results in the following output: Attempted to divide by zero. Unless there's some compelling reason you need an
In response to My Giant Calculator, Joost commented: I'll jump to the defense of trusty old calc.exe. Even though it's crappy, we know it's on every Windows box we touch. He's got a point. The applets that ship in the box
Have you ever noticed how many people keep a physical calculator next to their computer? The irony is almost palpable. My favorite is the calculator mousepad. Jef Raskin, in The Humane Interface, defends the practice of keeping a pocket calculator next to your PC: It's true. Many of
I've always been fascinated with road signs. And evidently so is Donald Knuth [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/diam.html ]: > During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we
Although I'm a big fan of rhythm games, I had no idea Guitar Hero [http://www.guitarherogame.com] was coming out until I saw the glowing GameSpot review [http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/puzzle/guitarhero/review.html]: > And here you thought that the rhythm game genre was