software development
I adore words, but let's face it: books suck. More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways: * They are heavy. * They take up too much space. * They have
programming languages
In What You Can't See You Can't Get I mentioned in passing how frustrated I was that the state of the art in code editors and IDE has advanced so little since 2003. A number of commenters pointed out the amazing Bret Victor talk Inventing on
pagination
What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally [http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/Pagination]. There are plenty of other real world examples [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/16/pagination-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/] in this
programming languages
I suppose What You See Is What You Get has its place, but as an OCD addled programmer, I have a problem with WYSIWYG as a one size fits all solution. Whether it's invisible white space, or invisible formatting tags, it's been my experience that forcing
programming concepts
At Stack Exchange, we insist that people who ask questions put some effort into their question, and we're kind of jerks about it. That is, when you set out to ask a question, you should … * Describe what's happening in sufficient detail that we can follow along.
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&
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
community management
In November, I delivered the keynote presentation at Øredev [http://oredev.org] 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
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
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,