Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
lazy programming
Philipp Lenssen agrees that inspired laziness is a desirable trait for software developers: ... only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code. The tools and processes inspired by laziness speed up
gaming
You may be familiar with the classic Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing* series of software from Broderbund. Well, Sega’s sublime Typing of the Dead is like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing... if Mavis Beacon was a flesh-eating zombie!! Any self-respecting software developer should be a decent typist. Now you can prove
user experience
Shawn Burke’s post Shippin’ Ain’t Easy (but somebody gotta do it) explains why you have to resist change at the end of a project, no matter how justifiable and rational the reasons may be. Even the smallest change has a real risk of introducing additional bugs. The first
sql
Ask yourself this question: what if everything could be queried with SQL? Microsoft’s LogParser does just that. It lets you slice and dice a variety of log file types using a common SQL-like syntax. It’s an incredibly powerful concept, and the LogParser implementation doesn’t disappoint. This architecture
events
A colleague of mine had some excellent comments on the surprising reentrancy issues you’ll run into when using Application.DoEvents(): The Application.DoEvents method is often used to allow applications to repaint while some longer task is taking place. This is usually the result of polling instead of using
.net
Omar Shahine’s Clean Sources is a nifty little right-click app for .NET developers: This application does one thing. It adds an explorer shell menu to folders that when selected will recursively delete the contents of the bin, obj and setup folders. If you have a .NET project that you
c++
If you were about to throw out your C++ compilers because of my post on the productivity benefits of managed code and scripting languages, hold your horses. Although managed code is pretty darn fast, sometimes performance still comes first. As Ole Eichorn points out in the comments: [You said] “given
image processing
Have you ever noticed how, in movies and television, actors can take a crappy, grainy low-res traffic camera picture of a distant automobile and somehow “enhance” the image until they can read the license plate perfectly? Yeah. I don’t know what kind of crazy infinite-detail fractal images these scriptwriters
programming languages
There’s a chart in Code Complete that compares the productivity of working in different languages: Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited with improving productivity, reliability, and comprehensibility
security
We were discussing nasty software hacks today at lunch. The worst hacks are always in software, but those software hacks have an insidious tendency to seep into the hardware, too. I was reminded of Intel’s infamous CPUID hack: Prior to the Pentium, software had to jump through elaborate loops
programming languages
I’m sure most of you are familiar with this famous Microsoft group photo from December 1978: Groovy. In case you were wondering, the photo is authentic. It’s even featured on the official Microsoft Bill Gates biography page. Of course we recognize Bill Gates in that famous photo, but
ui/ux
Windows Media Player may be the only windows application with a UI that gets progressively worse with each new version. It is my media player of choice due only to overwhelming indifference on my part; I curse every time I use it. That’s why I was so encouraged by