programming languages
I have the very great honor of speaking at this year’s EclipseCon with one of my heroes, Clay Shirky. The theme of this year’s EclipseCon is collaboration – so all the talks are presented by two speakers. Our talk, The Social Mind: Designing Like Groups Matter, will alternate between
software development concepts
I’ve been a longtime fan of Eric Lippert’s blog. And one of my favorite (albeit short-lived) post series was his Five Dollar Words for Programmers. Although I’ve sometimes been accused of being too wordy, I find that learning the right word to describe something you’re doing
puzzle
Have you ever been to an interview for a programming job where they asked you one of those interview puzzle questions? I have. The one I got was: How much of your favorite brand of soda is consumed in this state? And no, the correct answer is not who cares,
forums
I was struck by the conclusion of Andy Oram’s thoughtful piece on the next generation of online forums. People who want to learn more about computer technology and solve problems they encounter on their systems currently have a wealth of forums to turn to: mailing lists and newsgroups, official
c++
Back in September 2008, I mentioned that we were spawning a new process. Well, that process arrived today, and its id is Henry Burton Atwood. We’re starting him off right with a little light reading. You may recognize this book from Apple’s Mac vs PC ad series, specifically,
software development
I haven’t had the opportunity to talk at all about Google’s new Chrome browser yet. Which is a shame, because it’s easily the best web browser I’ve ever used. If it wasn’t for the complete and utter lack of an add-in ecosystem, I’d switch
productivity
As a software developer, how do you sharpen your saw? Sharpening the saw is shorthand for anything you do that isn’t programming, necessarily, but (theoretically) makes you a better programmer. It’s derived from the Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There’s a guy who
programming concepts
The performance of any computer is akin to a shell game. The computer performance shell game, also known as “find the bottleneck,” is always played between these four resources: * CPU * Disk * Network * Memory At any given moment, your computer is waiting for some operation to complete on one of these
html
The web is, to put it charitably, a rather forgiving place. You can feed web browsers almost any sort of HTML markup or JavaScript code and they’ll gamely try to make sense of what you’ve provided, and render it the best they can. In comparison, most programming languages
open source
The book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project is a fantastic reference for anyone involved in a software project – whether you’re running the show or not. In addition to the dead-tree edition, the book is available in an appropriately open source free format
networking
We sit at the intersection of two trends: 1. Most home networking gear, including routers, has safely transitioned to gigabit ethernet. 2. The generation, storage, and transmission of large high definition video files is becoming commonplace. If that sounds like you, or someone you know, there’s one tweak you
file compression
I’ve been playing around a bit with file compression again, as we generate some very large backup files daily on Stack Overflow. We’re using the latest 64-bit version of 7zip (4.64) on our database server. I’m not a big fan of more than dual core on