Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
usability
A reader recently pointed out that the second edition of Don’t Make Me Think is about to be released. I know I’ve pimped this book ad nauseam, but I can’t help myself – it’s just that good. If you only read one book on usability and UI,
usability
In this 1996 Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen champions writing for the web in an inverted pyramid style: Journalists have long adhered to the inverse approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion (“After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent”), follow by the most
programming languages
If you’ve ever viewed UNIX documentation, you’ve probably encountered variables foo and bar at some point. Here’s a Ruby example I found in the newsgroups: foo = 0 bar = 0 1.times do foo = 1 foo := 2 bar = foo+1 end puts foo, bar O’Reilly’s FooCamp
machine learning
Computer geeks have a long history of gaming the gaming industry. One of the most notable exploits is documented in the book Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (read an excerpt in Wired). But things have changed now that gambling
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. You play it interactively courtesy of the always amazing Internet Archive. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveSoftware Toolworks, Inc., The Also ForAmiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MacintoshDeveloped
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 SLQ? 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
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
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