programming
Software developers aren’t typically known for their superior levels of physical fitness. I’m not overweight, exactly, but I don’t think I’ll be pursuing that dream career in male modelling anytime soon. I charitably call myself an indoor enthusiast. At the risk of generalizing – yes, I know
web technologies
I’m a big YouTube fan. We can thank YouTube for cutting the gordian knot of video codecs. Instead of futzing around with codecs and media players, YouTube’s universal, Flash-based web video “just works.” After all this time, it turns out the killer app for Flash wasn’t
.net
A few friends and I just wrote a book together: The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks. I met K. Scott Allen, Jon Galloway, and Phil Haack through their excellent blogs. That online friendship carried over into real life. We always thought it’d be
fonts
I’ve experimented with programming fonts and IDE color schemes plenty in the past. But now that I’ve given in to the inevitability of ClearType on large LCDs, I’ve basically settled on Consolas. It’s hard to beat Consolas. It’s darn close to the ultimate monospace programming
software development
Source control is the very bedrock of software development. Without some sort of version control system in place, you can’t reasonably call yourself a software engineer. If you’re using a source control system of any kind, you’re versioning files almost by definition. The concept of versioning is
software development concepts
Raymond Chen notes that if you have to ask where the operating system limits are, you’re probably doing something wrong: If you're nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls,
display technology
If you’ve invested in a quality monitor for your computer, you owe it to yourself – and your eyes – to spend 15 minutes setting it up properly for your viewing environment. I’m not talking about a high-end color calibration, although you can certainly do that. I’m talking
web development
As video on the web becomes increasingly mainstream, I’ve been dabbling a bit with video sharing myself. But I’ve found that publishing video content on the web is extraordinarily painful, bordering on cruel and unusual punishment. The web upload process is a serious barrier to online video sharing,
programming concepts
Software developers do love to code. But very few of them, in my experience, can explain why they’re coding. Try this exercise on one of your teammates if you don’t believe me. Ask them what they’re doing. Then ask them why they’re doing it, and keep
Attending yesterday’s Halo 3 launch event at the Silicon Valley Microsoft campus – and the large Halo3 tournament we helped moderate – got me thinking about player ranking and matching systems. Without a well-designed ranking and matching system in place, you’ll get horribly mismatched games, where one team demolishes
software development concepts
I often trot out Steve McConnell’s doghouse analogy to illustrate how small projects aren’t necessarily representative of the problems you’ll encounter on larger projects. People who have written a few small programs in college sometimes think that writing large, professional programs is the same kind of work
hardware
Steve Olson contacted me a few weeks ago after he saw my post on ergonomic computing. Steve works for Ergotron, and offered to comp me some monitor arms. Usually when I get offered free items related to my blog, I politely decline. I don’t want a conflict of interest,