Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

Gee, I Wish I Had Spent More Time Alone With My Computer

I was recently reminded of this Dani Berry quote [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,8515/]: > One of the great pioneers of computer and online gaming, Dani Berry died in 1998. He was born 'Dan Bunten,' but underwent what she always referred to as her

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Google Hardware circa 1999

The always entertaining Dan [http://www.dansdata.com/] linked to something I hadn't seen before-- an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999 [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] : [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] Here

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Troubleshooting .NET performance using Peanut Butter

Here's some excellent, concise advice on troubleshooting performance in managed code [http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/25/421926.aspx]. It all starts with peanut butter, naturally: > My last entry [http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/23/421205.aspx] was some generic advice

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Incompetence Considered Harmful

A research paper from two psychologists at Cornell offers an interesting insight: For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine

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John Dvorak, blogging O.G.

Like Steve Broback [http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/05/blogs_and_googl_2.htm] , I spent many of my formative years in computing reading John Dvorak's magazine column. > I started enthusiastically reading John Dvorak's columns back in 1984, at my first job selling IBM PCs and

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VM Server Hosting

My friend Josh Carlisle was kind enough to host this website during my move to California. Josh set me up with a Microsoft Virtual Server slice of Windows 2003 Standard on his Xeon 2.8 server. I'm currently running a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, Perl) configuration which I

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Success through Failure

I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week's E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he's learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. "I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they&

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On Managed Code Performance, Again

Managed code may be fat and slow, but it fares surprisingly well in Rico's C# port of Raymond Chen's C++ Chinese/English dictionary reader: Sure, the C++ version eventually outperforms the managed code by a factor of 2x, but what's interesting to me-- and

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Bridges, Software Engineering, and God

Based on the number of times I've seen the comparison come up in my career, you might think that bridge building and software development were related in some way: > [..] my Dad [http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/people/faculty/cfabrams/], who is a "real" engineer, is

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Blogging about Blogging

I’ve avoided the incestuous nature of blogging about blogging until now, but the topic does come up occasionally. Not everyone is a believer in the utility of blogs; I was a skeptic only two years ago, and Michael Brundage went out of his way late last year to point

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Google-fu

Did you ever get the feeling that the browser address bar is the new command line? I keep forgetting how much functionality Google provides in their search text box; I was reminded when Damien Katz [http://damienkatz.net/] posted a link to a nice little Google search cheat sheet [http:

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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=61cdd546-7306-4aac-a64c-5288011ff613] , which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot [http://www.slashdot.org/] model: > [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments.

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