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
software development concepts
Joel, on the merits of dogfooding: Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product. I had forgotten how well it worked, until a month ago, I took home a build of CityDesk (thinking
technology trends
I’ve talked about the programmer’s take on keyboard and chair, but I have yet to cover that other computing staple: the mouse. I was reminded when HMK referenced Ars Technica’s, History of the GUI: This was the mouse, invented by Douglas himself [in 1968] and built by
cpu
Both AMD and Intel now have dual core CPUs on the market, in the form of the Athlon 64 X2 and the Pentium 4 D series. They may be expensive now, but I fully expect dual core architectures to trickle down to the rest of the lineup within the next
programming
In Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck notes that optimism is an occupational hazard of programming. Excess optimism, in the guise of enthusiasm, is a serious pitfall for game developers in particular: Rein in enthusiasm? Now why would we ever want to do that? Isn’t keeping the team motivated one
software development concepts
I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine a few days ago, and he described a project he recently inherited. It was the work of a half-dozen different developers, who each built their parts of the project in a completely different way with little to no
diversity
A few months ago there was a little brouhaha about lack of diversity in weblog authors, which caused a few ripples. Julia Lerman asks the same question about software development in a recent interview: I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of
programming concepts
I don’t know why I haven’t found this before, but Robert Read’s* How to be a Programmer (PDF version) is well worth your time: To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is
.net
I accepted a position at Vertigo Software today. You may know Vertigo from one or more of the following: * Quake II .NET (Managed C++) * IBuySpy (ASP.NET) * .NET Pet Shop (J2EE performance comparison) * Fitch & Mather (Windows DNA) * FotoVision, IssueVision (.NET Smart Client) I’m tremendously excited to join such
programming languages
If you develop software long enough, you’ll eventually run into Universal Modeling Language. This happened to me last year when we started working with our offshore vendor. UML is a diagramming standard that allows you to model software in a universal way. This could be theoretically be helpful if
qr code
I recently purchased a USB CueCat from eBay to play around with UPC barcodes, which I found out about from comments posted in a Scott Hanselman blog entry. It’s fun to run around the house scanning in UPCs from household items, although the low-powered LED reader in the
c++
In a recent post, Scott Koon proposes that to be a really good .NET programmer, you also need to be a really good C++ programmer: If you’ve spent all your life working in a GC’ed language, why would you ever need to know how memory management works, let
user experience
I was chatting with a fellow developer yesterday, who recently adopted the very cool Busy Box ASP.NET progress indicator that I recommended: We often need to provide a user message informing the user that their request is “processing.” Like the hour-glass mouse pointer lets the Windows user know