communication skills
I have a confession to make: in a way, I founded Stack Overflow to trick my fellow programmers. Before you trot out the pitchforks and torches, let me explain. Over the last 6 years, I’ve come to believe deeply in the idea that becoming a great programmer has very
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
hacker
Although I’ve never been more than a bush league hacker (at best), I was always fascinated with the tales from the infamous hacker zine 2600. I’d occasionally discover scanned issues in BBS ASCII archives, like this one, and spend hours puzzling over the techniques and information it contained.
assembly language
I was tickled to see that James Hague chose The Zen of Assembly Language Programming as one of five memorable books about programming. I wholeheartedly agree. Even if you never plan to touch a lick of assembly code in your entire professional career, this book is a fantastic and thoroughly
programming languages
I arrived at work today to find this package. It’s from one “C. Petzold,” whoever the heck that is. Inside was a copy of the book 3D Programming for Windows: Three-Dimensional Graphics Programming for the Windows Presentation Foundation. It’s even inscribed: This is, of course, a reference to
software development concepts
I was browsing around the CouchDb wiki yesterday when I saw Damien Katz’ hilarious description of how technical documentation really gets written. You know, in the real world: Welcome to the world of technical documentation! The situation you are in is no different from any other tech writer. The technical
programming languages
Scott Hanselman was kind enough to sing the praises of my blog a few months ago, completely unprompted. I finally met Scott in person at TechEd this year, and I can assure you that if you suck, Scott will be the first person to tell you that you suck.* That’
software development concepts
I’m currently reading Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass. It’s definitely a worthwhile book, although I do have two criticisms: 1. Someone really, really needs to buy Robert Glass a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Or at least get him a
software development concepts
I found these editorials buried on Steve McConnell’s website, from his stint as editor of IEEE software magazine. It’s a great series of articles; they’re all good, but I particularly recommend “Cargo Cult Engineering.” Here are direct links to each, in chronological order, October 1998 through February