In yesterday's post on Crashing Responsibly, I outlined a few ways to improve your application's crash behavior. In the event that your application crashes -- and oh, it will -- why not turn that crash into something that: * Records lots of diagnostic information developers can use
As programmers, it is our responsibility to ensure that when something goes horribly wrong with our software, the user has a reasonable escape plan. It's an issue of fundamental safety in software error handling that I liken to those ubiquitous airline safety cards. Which one accurately depicts the
In Where Are All The Open Source Billionaires? I used this chart as an illustration: Because open source code is freely distributable, anyone can take that code and create their own unique mutant mashup version of it any time they feel like it. Whether anyone else in the world will
One of the things we're thinking about while building stackoverflow.com [http://stackoverflow.com/] is how to let users style the questions and answers they're entering on the site. Nothing's decided at this point, but we definitely won't be giving users one
Let's say, just as a hypothetical, you're sitting at your computer, casually chatting with a fellow programmer. You begin to describe some bit of code, then bring it up on your display to illustrate. You want to highlight some particular part of the code. Perhaps you
Everywhere I look, programmers and programming tools seem to have standardized on XML. Configuration files, build scripts, local data storage, code comments, project files, you name it -- if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably XML. I
You've probably read this classic boner of an iPod quote at some point: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. It's from the Slashdot article on the introduction of the original Apple iPod back in 2001. I had always assumed this particular quote was written
Like everything else in software engineering, it seems, the concept of Model-View-Controller was originally invented by Smalltalk programmers. More specifically, it was invented by one Smalltalk programmer, Trygve Reenskaug. Trygve maintains a page that explains the history of MVC in his own words. He arrives at these definitions in a
The Garmin Nuvi GPS first got my attention when it came not just recommended, but insanely recommended by Jason Fried in late 2005. So, back to the 350… Oh wow. The Nuvi 350 is insanely good. Next to the iPod it's the the
Like Donald Knuth, I think much of the current multicore hype is overrated. The machine I use today has dual processors. I get to use them both only when I'm running two independent jobs at the same time; that's nice, but it happens only a few
Pop quiz, hotshot. Which one is the superior Uniform Resource Locator? www.fakeplasticrock.com or fakeplasticrock.com This is one of those intractable problems. Global wars have been fought over so much less. In hacker circles, this is sometimes referred to as a bikeshed discussion. That said, I do have
One of the central themes of stackoverflow.com is that software developers no longer learn programming from books, as Joel mentioned: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Joel expressed similar sentiments in 2004&