security
The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you’re connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web’s Cookie Jar. It’s difficult
programming languages
I am no longer a part of Stack Exchange. I still have much literal and figurative stock in the success of Stack Exchange, of course, but as of March 1st I will no longer be part of the day to day operations of the company, or the Stack Exchange sites,
design
I enjoy my iPhone, but I can’t quite come to terms with one aspect of its design: Apple’s insistence that there can be only ever be one, and only one, button on the front of the device. I also own a completely buttonless Kindle Fire, and you’ll
community management
In November, I delivered the keynote presentation at Øredev 2011. It was the second and probably final presentation in the series I call Building Social Software for the Anti-Social. I’ve spent almost four years thinking about the Q&A format, and these two presentations are the culmination of
programming languages
When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 – then known as Stack Overflow – we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included: * Reddit and Digg voting * Xbox 360 achievements * Wikipedia
security
Perhaps you’ve seen this recent XKCD about password choice? It prompted a spirited debate – even on our very own Security Stack Exchange – about the merits of the argument presented there. Now, to be clear, I’m completely on Randall’s side here; I’m all for passphrases over passwords,
performance
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
authentication
Back in summer 2008 when we were building Stack Overflow, I chose OpenID logins for reasons documented in Does The World Really Need Yet Another Username and Password: I realize that OpenID is far from an ideal solution. But right now, the one-login-per-website problem is so bad that I am
programming languages
As a guy who spends most of his day typing words on a screen, it’s hard for me to take touch computing seriously. I love my iPhone 4, and smartphones are the ultimate utility belt item, but attempting to compose any kind of text on the thing is absolutely
programming languages
When it comes to running Stack Overflow, the company, I take all my business advice from one person, and one person alone: Curtis Armstrong. More specifically, Curtis Armstrong as Charles De Mar from the 1985 absurdist teen comedy classic, Better Off Dead. When asked for advice on how to ski
speech recognition
Remember that Scene in Star Trek IV where Scotty tried to use a Mac Plus? Using a mouse or keyboard to control a computer? Don’t be silly. In the future, clearly there’s only one way computers will be controlled: by speaking to them. There’s only one teeny-tiny
css
We’re currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type exercise on our family of Q&A websites, which I affectionately refer to as “the Trilogy”: * Server Fault * Super User * Stack Overflow * Meta Stack Overflow (In case you were wondering, yes, meta is the Star Wars Holiday