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
programming languages
When it comes to running Stack Overflow, the company [http://stackexchange.com/about/management], I take all my business advice from one person, and one person alone: Curtis Armstrong. [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0035664/] More specifically, Curtis Armstrong as Charles De Mar from the 1985 absurdist teen comedy classic,
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
css
We're currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type excerise 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
programming languages
As far as I'm concerned, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen space. By "screen", I mean not just large monitors, but multiple large monitors. I've been evangelizing multiple monitors since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition:
usability
Writing code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users [https://blog.codinghorror.com/shipping-isnt-enough/], and creating applications that people actually want to use [https://blog.codinghorror.com/youll-never-have-enough-cheese/] — now that's the hard stuff. I've been a long time fan
usability
If you've ever wrangled a user interface, you've probably heard of Fitts' Law. It's pretty simple – the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual
laptops
As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: The end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to
microformats
I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat "elevator pitch" tells us nothing
usability
After I posted my blog entry on Treating User Myopia I got a lot of advice. Some useful, some not so useful. But the one bit of advice I hadn't anticipated was that we were not making good use of the area "above the fold". This
usability
I try not to talk too much about the trilogy here, because there's a whole other blog for that stuff. But some of the lessons I've learned in the last year while working on them really put into bold relief some of my earlier blog entries