Spawning a New Process

I don't usually talk about my personal life here, but I have to make an exception in this case. I debated for days which geeky reference I would use as a synonym for "we're having a baby". The title is the best I could

Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly

So I have this friend. I've told him time and time again how dangerous XSS vulnerabilities are, and how XSS is now the most common of all publicly reported security vulnerabilities -- dwarfing old standards like buffer overruns and SQL injection. But will he listen? No. He'

Deadlocked!

You may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined over the last three weeks. That's because I've been busy building that Stack Overflow thing we talked about. It's going well so far. Joel Spolsky also seems to think it's going well,

Check In Early, Check In Often

I consider this the golden rule of source control: Check in early, check in often. Developers who work for long periods -- and by long I mean more than a day -- without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line.

The Perils of FUI: Fake User Interface

As a software developer, tell me if you've ever done this: 1. Taken a screenshot of something on the desktop 2. Opened it in a graphics program 3. Gone off to work on something else 4. Upon returning to your computer, attempted to click on the screenshot as

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

One of the early technology decisions we made on Stack Overflow was to go with a fairly JavaScript intensive site. Like many programmers, I've been historically ambivalent about JavaScript: * The Power of "View Source" * The Day Performance Didn't Matter Any More * JavaScript and HTML:

Music to (Not) Code By

Occasionally people will ask me what kind of music I like to code by. I'm not sure I am the right person to ask this question of. Allow me to explain by citing my 2001 Amazon review of a particular album. It all started so innocently. I purchased

On Our Project, We're Always 90% Done

Although I love reading programming books, I find software project management books to be some of the most mind-numbingly boring reading I've ever attempted. I suppose this means I probably shouldn't be a project manager. The bad news for the Stack Overflow team is that I

Quantity Always Trumps Quality

Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development "art" -- perhaps "craft" would be more appropriate, or "engineering" if you're feeling

Alpha, Beta, and Sometimes Gamma

As we begin the private beta for Stack Overflow later this week, I wondered: where do the software terms alpha and beta come from? And why don't we ever use gamma? Alpha and Beta are the first two characters of the Greek alphabet. Presumably these characters were chosen

Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

In April I donated $5,000 [https://blog.codinghorror.com/donating-5000-to-net-open-source/] of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project. It was exciting to be able to inject some of the energy from this blog into the often-neglected [http://reddevnews.com/blogs/weblog.aspx?blog=2407]

Understanding The Hardware

I got a call from Rob Conery today asking for advice on building his own computer. Rob works for Microsoft, but lives in Hawaii. I'm not sure how he managed that, but being so far from the mothership apparently means he has the flexibility to spec his own