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
learning
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’ve worked on,
performance
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 what this graph
software development
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, who is a “real” engineer, is out visiting for a few days. We got talking tonight about the
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
google search
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 posted a link to a nice little Google search cheat sheet. Google also automatically recognizes
community
Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin, which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot model: [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments. There were a couple of other features that distinguished the K5 community such as
database
In a recent article, Doug Reilly makes a fairly well reasoned case for the use of stored procedures in lieu of ad-hoc SQL: So, should you use SPs or ad-hoc SQL? The answer is “it depends.” I have placed myself firmly on the side of doing all database
open source
Traditional wisdom says that the “code first, design later“ approach is a bad idea. However, Charles Miller points out that when it comes to open source projects, it’s mandatory: I would almost go as far as saying that starting an open source project with no code and a committee
.net
Robert Cringeley, in a post early last year, raised some concerns about reverse engineering .NET code: .NET is almost exclusively Just-In-Time compiled. JIT’ing means, “I was just about to interpret this, but I’ll compile it at the very last minute instead.” In effect, the .NET code
usability
Philipp Lenssen recently conducted an interesting experiment in usability minimalism where he visually deleted all the unused elements from the web pages he visits every day. Viewing some of Philipp’s native German web pages, I was reminded how powerful conventions can be; the page layout and formatting are strong
windows
Windows XP’s automatic update facility is clearly a good thing. Except when an update is installed that requires a reboot and you’re working on the computer at the time. Then you get this lovely dialog: As if I needed another reason to hate dialog boxes. This is perhaps
productivity
Johanna Rothman posted a number of what she calls Schedule Games on her product development blog: 1. Schedule Chicken 2. 90% Done 3. Bring Me a Rock 4. Hope is Our Most Important Strategy 5. Queen of Denial 6. Sweep Under the Rug 7. Schedule Dream Time or Happy Date